Overview
The Work We Do
Foster Care
PATH was founded by foster parents, and foster care in its many forms continues to be our primary service. For us, foster care involves committed foster families, partnering with trained social workers, to provide care and nurturance to children in family settings.
The support provided to foster parents includes extensive training, regular contact from social workers, meaningful foster parent support groups, and the development of an individual treatment plan that endeavors to involve birth parents, schools, therapists, and the community in the care.
Treatment Foster Care
An outgrowth of structured foster care, like PATH's, is treatment foster care. PATH was one of the first agencies involved in developing treatment foster care in North America and was the first stand-alone foster care program to be accredited for treatment foster care. As defined by the FFTA Program Standards for Treatment Foster Care, treatment foster care is an organized program of foster family-based services designed to meet special needs of children. Treatment foster care is PATH's largest service and accounts for 80% of our budget.
Special Needs Foster Care
We also believe family foster homes can be the right setting to provide services to children with special needs, such as having chronic medical conditions (medical foster care), recovering from substance abuse, having been a sex offender, or suffering from hearing and sight loss(special needs foster care). We have also experienced great success with whole family foster care, which involves the parent and child both coming into a PATH foster home to receive support and mentoring, as they build a new family.
Crisis Nursery, Assessment, and Shelter Care
Over the years we have learned that family foster homes are an ideal setting for other residential services. As a result, our family foster homes are used as the site to provide crisis nursery, diagnosis and assessment, and shelter care.
Adoption
PATH is part of a national trend in which 80% of special needs adoptions involve foster parents. PATH is licensed as an adoption agency in North Dakota and Minnesota and provides education and support to foster parents in Wisconsin. We work with PATH foster parents, as well as other families interested in special needs adoption. In the past year, PATH helped complete 37 adoptions and was involved with post adoption support and pre adoption work with nearly 80 families.
Counseling and Family-Based Services
PATH social workers and foster families provide a variety of services to help keep kids out of foster care and with their families. The services have different names and funding sources in each state. Generally, though, we provide two types of services.
The first type of service is provided directly to the child. This includes Children's Therapeutic Services and Supports and individual psycho therapy. It also can involve targeted case management. PATH does believe it is important to involve families in treatment and involves the parents or foster parents in the direct work with the child, if possible.
The second type of service involves work with the whole family. This includes family-based services and family counseling. The goal is to provide counseling, support, and mentoring to families so that the child does not need to come into care or return to care. In North Dakota we also offer Family Mentoring which involves assigning a child and his family to a foster family. The foster family provides mentoring, support and respite to the family and can serve as a crisis or respite home for the child.
