Project Return Home expands the reach and impact of Bethany Christian Services’ existing child trauma center to serve urban Grand Rapids and the metropolitan Kent County area of West Central Michigan. The target population is traumatized children aged 3-18 who have been removed from their homes due to child abuse, neglect, or maltreatment, and who live in foster care or other out-of-home placement. Trauma treatment will also be delivered to their parents, most of whom struggle with their own unresolved sources of childhood trauma. The project will adapt/replicate an empirically based trauma-informed treatment model to help foster children achieve four measurable outcomes: 1) reduce behavioral problems extending from childhood trauma; 2) increase the rate and timeliness of child-family reunification; 3) reduce the number of disrupted foster placements; and 4) reduce the rates of recidivism for repeat out-of-home placement of children.
Bethany partners with the Child and Adolescent Traumatic Stress Center of Allegheny General Hospital, Pittsburgh, to replicate the trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF-CBT) model for foster children, and will draw on the resources of its own Child and Family Traumatic Stress Center, which has successfully implemented two other U.S. Department of Health and Human Services-funded clinical models for treating traumatized adopted youth and youth aging out of the foster care system.