| Boys and Girls Home and Family Services offers a comprehensive, interrelated continuum of services including inpatient and outpatient care, education, childcare and outreach programs. These services provide support to individuals of all ages, from the very young to the very old, and focus on strengthening families by meeting the unique needs of each individual member.
The administrative office for the agency is located in Sioux City, Iowa, a community located at the intersection of Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota. From this location, services are provided in the tri-state region, commonly referred to as Siouxland, as well as throughout the three states. In addition, services are now available in the state of Alaska.
Clients served range from...
- Children and adult victims of sexual abuse or domestic violence working to reclaim their dignity, self-esteem and confidence
- Adolescents learning more appropriate ways to manage their anger and emotions, discontinuing delinquent and destructive behavior that has negatively affected their lives and their family
- Children needing support and guidance after being removed from their home due to abuse and/or neglect
- Children and adults who suffer from emotional and/or psychiatric issues
- Parents wanting to improve their parenting skills
- Students who could benefit from alternative education programming
In a remarkably swift response to the data, OJJDP has moved to support Trauma Informed Care as a child focused intervention strategy that will benefit communities well into the future. The OJJDP's demand for collaboration and "Whole Child" approach is the fundamental driving force behind our mission and the Midwest Trauma Services Network (MTSN).
BCF, began its non-profit operations in 2004, with a base in Metro Boston and extended initiatives in the greater New England area, providing evidence-based traumatic stress reduction and disaster relief programs since 1996 with strategic partners in the behavioral and medical health fields. The BCF team is committed to offering clients an array of choices among services. In terms of community-based traumatic incident intervention, this spectrum of choice must include not only types of interventions, but also, perhaps most importantly, locations of care and culturally and linguistically compatible interventions. BCF has designed, developed and offers Psychological First Aid (PFA), Post Traumatic Stress Management (PTSM) interventions tailored to children and youth, parent and youth resiliency training programs, and acute traumatic stress orientation workshops in a variety of locations, including private residences, schools, houses of worship, community centers, housing authorities, detention centers, and juvenile courts. BCF has access to over 1,000 licensed clinicians and community-based PTSM responders who can meet the needs of the very diverse youth populations of Metro Boston and New England. BCF, in affiliation with the International Center for Disaster Resilience has a specialty team of disaster behavioral health responders that have worked in the US, Asia and Africa post disaster and war to deliver state of the art psychosocial resiliency programs that have now reached over 400,000 youth.
The International Center for Disaster Resilience (ICDR) has devoted its resources and extraordinary personnel to the design, development and practice of the fusion of state of the art emergency medical and psychosocial interventions that allow the service provider and the patient to access resilient recovery in shorter periods of time with less invasive care. ICDR provides the Boston Childrens Foundation with the medical expertise and the disaster behavioral health expertise to respond to disaster management challenges across diverse settings with a particular focus on children and long term child protection post disaster.
Rainbowdance groups are highly structured and theme specific. Using carefully selected rhythmic orientation, through music and repetition, each group session is complemented by storytelling and theme based movement improvisations. The music used for this program is a composite of simple folk tunes and classical pieces; the stories and improvisations have themes of cooperation, respect, trust, honor, and gentleness, and are developed to expose each child to adaptive coping strategies for successfully meeting normal developmental challenges, as well as constructive solutions to conflict.
By offering a repetitive, sensorimotor menu of successful coping solutions and alternatives to violence, Rainbowdance provides a conditioning sequence that supports ongoing solution generation (essential problem solving skill component), ability to ask for help in challenging social situations, ability to take another peer's viewpoint and ability to self-soothe. The movement sequences are developmentally appropriate and allow each child to join and to succeed. The transitions between sequences are smooth and lyrical; recognizing that even the normal, non- traumatized child is frightened by changes which are too rapid or which come without warning. The games are non- competitive: all are designed with a win-win outcome (for one child to win, all must win).
Rainbowdance has been adapted for: Toddlers, Preschool and kindergarten children, for refugee children and their mothers, for Autistic, Deaf, and Blind children, as well as those with physical impairment and attention or learning delays.
|
