The Intercept program specializes in providing services to troubled youth and their families at times convenient for the families; preserving youth from out-of-home placements by helping their families safely maintain youth in the home and community; and successfully reuniting youth who are in a residential treatment facility, foster home, psychiatric residential treatment facility, hospital, group home, or detention center with their families in the community. Family intervention specialists are skilled at reuniting families even when the child has been out of the home, and possibly in multiple placements, for an extended period. Several important factors contribute to the long-term success this service provides for children, including the intensity of the program, low staff case loads, active 24/7 on-call structure, and thorough evaluation processes. The Intercept program utilizes multiple evidence-based models and program fidelity measures which are described in the program scope of services.Intercept assigns a single family intervention specialist to work with the youth and family over a six-to nine-month period. Lengths of stay in the program vary depending on if the child is in the home at the time of referral (considered a “preservation” case) or is out-of-the home (considered a “reunification” case). The family intervention specialist works closely with caregivers, the child, teachers, other school personnel, neighbors, extended family, state case managers, probation officers, and even members of the child’s peer group and their parents. Family intervention specialists are available to the family 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Essential components of a specialist’s work with families generally include:

• Conducting family and individual sessions

• Safety planning

• 24/7 Crisis intervention

• Providing parenting skills education – including consistency, discipline, communication, and coping strategies

• Facilitating educational achievement – including the role of the family in building positive student/school and parent/teacher relationships

• Facilitating the development of positive peers and monitoring by parents

• Offering special strategies concentrating on issues of problem sexual behaviors and substance use

• Teaching age appropriate personal habits and social skills

• Helping the family access community resources for the entire family and develop a social support network in their natural environment (extended family, neighborhood, church, school, etc.)

• Facilitating reunification by working with other providers, case manager, and court staff

• Attending Court, preparing youth and families for Court, communicating with case manager and Court staff

Family needs generally include some combination of the following:

• communication

   

• limit-setting

• affective relations

• monitoring of the child’s peers

• interactions with the school

• marital relations

• problem-solving skills

• support from extended family and community

• concrete needs such as housing, employment, and health care