Jewish Child and Family Services

¶ … Jewish Child and Family Services (JCFS) since it is within my community, services a wide, not necessarily, Jewish population, has a significant reputation, and, most importantly, I myself have used some of its services and know some of its personnel well.

Having an easy access to Robyn Carr, one of the social workers there, and someone who has been affiliated with the JCFS for several years already, I asked Robyn to give me a rundown of the program related to prevention or correction programs for adolescents, before I asked her the following questions:

What is the purpose of your organization?

The JCFS offers a wide spectrum of services to all sorts of individuals. Although slanted as Jewish, it is not necessarily so, and there are many non-Jewish individuals who actually use our organization. In summary form, the JCFS profiles programs that include counseling, care for abused and neglected youth, support with children with disabilities and their families, special education, help for teens that have it rough, and residential and child welfare services which is the topic of this interview.

The residentail services are preventaive: we have helped many teens who run away from home, who are homeless, or who are otherwise going through some crisis by, aside from providing them with counseling, also providing them with a choice of five group homes each of which has a support system in place. There is a counselor on the premises all the time as well as the dormitory 'parents', and we attempt to give the adolescents as much support as possible to replace their current insignificant or negligible support framework.

How does this program specifically help residents of the community ( give a minimum of two ways)?

We provide the teens with counseling, and secondly we provide them with the warm and nurturing environment that they might otherwise lack. We also help them sort out their goals and assist them with finding jobs and, otherwise settling down in life, so that they refrain from turning to negative activities (such as crimes or drugs that would otherwise absorb them). Our objective in other words is to keep them off the street, and to keep those who have dropped out from dropping out even further. or, in other words, to pull them back once they have dropped out.

A resident in the Rosenberg house once told Shelley Weiss (the coordinator) that "when I was living in your house, there was always someone who understood me." Those are the kind of services that we try to provide. To understand and be there for the adolescents so that they feel they have someone -- a small family -- that cares.

The residents indicate a wide range of problems from mood disorders to oppositional conduct, ADHD, and developmental disorders. To deal with that spectrum we have a multidisciplinary team that cares for each resident's medical, educational, psychiatric, and emotional needs. Each home also has a qualified clinician who provides individual and group therapy when necessary.

Another program that is linked to the services that we provide the residents is the choice of participating in the Therapeutic Recreation program, that provides a number of activities from yoga to swimming to art and music features and, a ctually, is streamlined to suit our wide diversity of kids who not only come form a broad array of backgrounds but also demonstrate a dpecrum of religious beliefs (or disbelif), and a wide plethora of characteristics.

The JCFS provide five homes for the kids:

1. The Price Pregnant and Parenting Teen Group Home -- that accepts maximum 8 teens who are either pregnant or mothers. The people who work there include a nurse, a therapist, a child development specialist, as well as a well-organized childcare staff.

2. The Rosenberg Group Home that accepts girls from 12 to 21 years old. It can take as many as twelve at one time.

3. The Cummings Group Home -- small and highly structured accepted maximum six boys at one time between the ages of 6 and 13.

4. Aggregate Foster Homes:

(a) Talman Home (for girls) and (b) Campbell Home (for boys).

Both homes accept children between the ages of 11 and twenty. The Talman home can take in as many as six at one time, whereas at Campbell we do not accept more than seven children simultaneously. Both homes have a highly trained and supportive childcare staff, as well as a therapist on the premises.

The innovation with both places is that they are structured along family lines where a so-called foster parent (or foster couple) takes the place of the parents that the child may not have.

What is the cost of the services?

- Who pays for the services?

We ask for a minimal cost from the parents or natural caretakers of the family (such as grandparents or closest relative if one or more of the parents cannot provide). All of this is assessed on a sliding scale. Hardly anyone pays the full amount, which would naturally be exorbitant.

- What resources are available for those who cannot pay for the service?

- in general, what are the sources of funding for the organization?

For those who cannot afford to pay or can afford only partial payment we receive supplementary Child Support.

We also receive funding from the Illinois Department of Human Services, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, and from the Illinois State Board of Education.

- if these services did not exist, what do you think would happen to the clients in need of the services?

There is no doubt in my mind that the children would otherwise be on the streets, involved in drugs, or in some type of crime. Before I came here, I worked with a similar organization in California, where kids, sometimes, killed themselves out of desperation and got into all sorts of mess. The JCFS prevent this.

What happens to the resident/client as a result of the program?

The resident finds a safe place where he can grow up, discovers himself, finds out what he or she wants to do with his life, and gains the assistance to do it. This doesn't happen with all, of course, but a great many have been helped through the JCFS to a more secure future. With a parenting or parenting mum, the kid is given the tools to help her bring up her kid in a healthy way. Often these kids come from homes where they have no idea what it is to provide a healthy functional life for a child. The JCFS helps them.

The interview lasted for almost an hour. There were no difficulties since I was already well-acquainted with the place, had actually seen the homes several times when driving past, and had marveled at their spaciousness and proximity to wide open spaces, a river, and parks.

The new information that I gained was the extent to which the JCFS went out of its way to care for adolescents who would likely have been homeless without this support. I was also impressed with the details of the support network arranged for the youth, and with the observation that each need of the adolescent seemed to be thought of and provided for.

This information has been helpful to me in my intended career in the following way:

I intend to help children; particularly adolescents deal with the traumas of their life.