After financially helping foster and adoptive families for six years, Chosen made a large pivot to focus on a significant gap in services for the actual healing of childhood trauma caused by abuse and neglect. This gap often leaves well-intentioned families under-equipped to meet the needs of their children. Unless addressed, trauma becomes cyclical and creates a greater complexity of needs. A matched child for a family is not enough.
Children in the welfare system suffer trauma and are left with mental and emotional damage that manifests in behavioral issues. Our model of care addresses the holistic needs of the child and each family member. Core services are trauma-informed education, developmental dyadic psychotherapy, and mentoring, along with intensive case management using evidence-based methodologies.
Since inception, we have reported zero foster dissolutions and zero adoption disruptions, meaning no client who went through our programs for six months or longer, willingly re-homed their children or put them back in the child welfare system. This is significant compared to the general population where 50% of foster parents quit after one year and reportedly 10 – 25% of adoptive children are rehomed.
This is a catalytic project to help with infrastructure costs for scaling our critical telehealth services on a national level. This grant would be dedicated to help us with the next steps of establishing a third-party payer system, which creates a sustainable funding stream.
For several reasons, we believe this effort fits perfectly with the mission of Legacy Collective to engage systemic problems related to social issues by resourcing the most innovative efforts:
Innovative: Using a secure telehealth model has been extremely effective for families who are desperate for help and allows us to reach anybody, anywhere.
Systemic: Most child welfare agencies are focused on the safety of children, and rightly so. We are focused on the healing of children to disrupt generational cycles. We work with both federal and state governments on transformational public policy to better serve vulnerable children.
Permanency: Chosen is focused on preventing family breakdown and children from re-entering foster or congregant care. This includes at-risk birth families and relative caretakers.
Sustainable: Establishing fees for services for those with the ability to pay via Medicaid reimbursements and 3rd party (insurance billing) will help Chosen not be 100% reliant on donors, also funding future staff needs.
Chosen measures success in four major categories: parental stress levels, trauma symptom behaviors, parental ability to handle challenging behaviors, and permanency (numbers of foster dissolution or adoption disruption). We see a reduction in stress and anxiety levels in caregivers, a decrease in trauma-induced behaviors of the clients’ children – including reduced anger, anxiety, post-traumatic stress and dissociative behaviors, and an increase in the feeling of being equipped to parent. We also expect to see a decreased number of foster disruptions and adoption dissolutions.
Building the infrastructure for third party billing will allow us to serve exponentially more hurting children and families.
Chosen is committed to growing nationally, as we receive calls from all over the country. It is essential to have the startup funding to establish the payer system in order to effectively scale. Once the structure is established, it will generate income that helps sustain Chosen’s services.
Total Funding Requested: $30,000
Funding Date Requirement: 05/01/2020
Initiative Video or Related Links:
Nonprofit Name: Chosen
Nonprofit Website: https://www.chosen.care/
0
New Braunfels, Texas, United States
Share Via Email