Examples of workshops include:

• Self Care: Taking Good Care of Yourself
• Sexually Exploited Children
• Strategies for Coping with Anxiety and Depression

Solutions for Living is proud to partner with the following community organizations:

• The Massachusetts Department of Children and Families
• The Massachusetts Council of Human Services Providers, Inc
• The Massachusetts Association of Family Centered Providers
• Various Graduate Schools of Human Services
• The Massachusetts Child Trauma Project

Solutions for Living is proud to actively participate in the following community task forces:

• TILT-Trauma Informed Leadership Team at the Cambridge Department of Children and Families
• The City of Medford Mental Health and Substance Abuse Case Conference

Solutions for Living has been providing mediation services since 1976, when the agency’s founder Richard Bedine started one of the first community mediation programs in Massachusetts.  Our peer mediation programs provide students and staff with an understanding of conflict and the tools for effective resolution.

Mediation sessions are conducted by certified peer mediators who are skilled in modeling constructive communication and experienced in helping mediation participants to draw upon their own strengths. Sessions are held in an informal, but structured atmosphere conducive to direct and open communication. 

Ginny Keenan, coordinator of Solutions for Living’s School Mediation and Living in Two Worlds programs, was recently honored by the Anti-Defamation League of Massachusetts for her work at Lynn English High School.  More information can be found at  http://www.itemlive.com/news/anti-defamation-league-honors-local-pair/

Living in Two Worlds is a partnership between Solutions for Living and the Lynn Public Schools. The program operates in both Lynn English and Lynn Classical High Schools. The goal of Living in Two Worlds is to encourage respect for diversity and promote understanding across cultures. The program provides a place for bicultural and immigrant students to share their personal experiences both around their culture and acclimation to life in America. The highlight of this program is the productions of short videos for each participant, depicting the challenges and rewards of their journey to and within the United States. The attendees of the film festival benefit from hearing the direct experience of these students.

Living in Two Worlds is funded by a “100K for 100 Grant” from the Cummings Foundation. For more information about this foundation please visit www.CummingsFoundation.org

Creating Solutions with Families is anchored by a relationship-based approach including three elements: skill building, psycho-education and advocacy.

Solutions for Living family counselors

• provide the high-quality relationship necessary to support family resiliency.
• serve as role models and bridge builders.
• help families to rebound from and reach beyond hardship
• encourage families to become active participants in their own growth and recovery.

In addition to developing positive relationships with family members, family counselors work to cultivate nurturing relationships among family members through family counseling, and between the family and community through advocacy.  As we build positive, corrective relationships with youth and families, we enhance human potential, foster empowerment and instill hope.

Our Creating Solutions with Families program addresses the needs of the family as a unit and works both to stabilize and strengthen the family’s ability to provide a growth-enhancing environment and to prevent potential abuse, neglect, and trauma and out-of-home placement. Solutions for Living serves families who are challenged by ineffective communication patterns and behaviors, the experience of domestic violence, substance abuse, sexual abuse, temporary out-of-home placement of a child/adolescent and/or reunification of a child/adolescent. Our counselors are skilled at addressing the needs of families with a history of child abuse and/or neglect, and the concerns of children and adolescents who exhibit at-risk behaviors.  Solutions for Living has also demonstrated expertise in assisting families facing the challenges of adoption or teen parenting.

The design of the family program is customized to fit the needs and strengths of each family as determined through the comprehensive assessment of family structure and functioning.  Meetings with the family may include individual sessions with the identified child/adolescent client, individual sessions with a parent, joint sessions with the parenting team, parent-child sessions, and family sessions. Sessions are held within the home unless safety or privacy factors warrant out-of-home sessions. Activity-based family sessions are provided when necessary to engage children and adolescents who may be skeptical of the family intervention process, and then as needed throughout the course of the intervention as an incentive for goal attainment.

The Creating Solutions with Families Program provides 24-hour crisis coverage to the family, with an emphasis on teaching portable crisis management skills.

Since 1989, Solution for Living’s Parent Mentor Intervention has helped families strengthen their capacity to create a growth enhancing family environment, as well as  diminish the risk for abuse, neglect or out-of-home placement.  By learning and practicing communication skills, behavior management and effective parenting techniques, and by broadening their access to family and community supports, parents develop the necessary skills and acquire supportive resources to provide a healthy, safe and nurturing family environment.  Since the program imparts portable skills as it strengthens the family unit, it enables the family to continue to function autonomously, ensuring the long-term benefits to the children when the family graduates program. Our parent mentor intervention is relationship based and comprised of three interwoven and complementary components: skill building, psycho-education, and advocacy.

The goal is to strengthen the parents’ reciprocal, enduring, emotional and physical attachment with their child(ren). Challenges to parenting often exist due to a history of child abuse, neglect, trauma, domestic violence, substance abuse, and/or mental illness. To assist parents in responding effectively to their child(ren)’s needs, parent mentors provide a trusting relationship that is responsive to the parents’ individual, unfulfilled needs for nurturance.  The mentoring relationship can be successful in interrupting an intergenerational cycle of unproductive and ineffective relationships.

Parent and mentor meet weekly for a 2-hour session.  Sessions take place in the home, unless safety or privacy factors warrant out of home meetings.  Outings in the community for socialization purposes and to access resources will also occur.  Sessions are scheduled to accommodate the parent’s need for transportation to appointments or for other parental responsibilities.

Skill building focuses on helping parents build a larger repertoire of healthy parenting including  establishing rituals, routines and structure utilizing organizational strategies.  Parent mentors also engage parents in the process of developing behavioral and chore distribution charts and calendars.  The mentor/parent relationship serves as a forum to model family relationship building through active listening, positive reinforcement and assertive communication.

Psycho-education focuses on helping parents gain a better understanding of their personal and family dynamics in an effort to stabilize and strengthen the family unit. Parents are provided with psycho-educational material to promote an increased understanding of their children’s developmental needs and age-appropriate child care.

Advocacy focuses on broadening the parent’s connection to family and community-based support systems.  Parent mentors utilize modeling, coaching and role playing to enhance parents’ capacity to access and interface with community resources.

The Parent Mentor Program provides 24 hour crisis coverage to parents for support/direction.

Since 1979, Solutions for Living’s relationship-based Creating Solutions with Youth Program has successfully engaged at-risk youth who have typically been reluctant to engage in traditional approaches to therapy. The Creating Solutions with Youth program strengthens the youth/adolescent’s ability to function in a growth-enhancing, resilient manner at home, in school and within the community.  Youth served by this program range in age from seven to seventeen.

Individual sessions with the youth/adolescent are the primary focus of the intervention and serve as the vehicle through which the relationship, so essential to the success of the intervention, develops.  Sessions can take place at home, in school, and within the community, according to preference and need. Activity-based sessions are provided when necessary to initially engage a youth, and then sporadically throughout the course of the intervention when needed as incentive for goal attainment.  Structured to highlight the youth’s unique strengths, skills and experiences, each intervention is customized to support the youth/adolescent’s progress toward his/her specific goals. Solutions for Living’s staff provide the specific skills, advocacy and psycho-education required to support each youth/adolescent’s progress toward his/her particular goals.

Through skill building, we help youth and parents develop competencies in:

• Establishing and maintaining safety/self-care
• Expressing and managing feelings/self-soothing
• Communicating
• Decision-making
• Independent living
• Resolving conflicts
• Relationship building

Through psycho-education, we help youth and parents better understand:

• Developmentally appropriate needs and behaviors
• The impact of a family history of trauma, substance abuse or loss
• The relationship between feelings, thoughts and behaviors
• The need for affective awareness/emotional intelligence

Through advocacy, we connect youth and families with community resources including:

• Educational/Vocational programs
• Medical and mental health services/Support groups
• Community-based youth groups/Recreational programs

The Creating Solutions with Youth Program also provides 24-hour coverage to youth and their families. Each crisis is viewed as a “teachable moment”, an opportunity for clients to learn and integrate new coping skills.

Solutions for Living’s Youth Mentor/Tracker Program is designed for youth and adolescents who require regular monitoring services to stabilize their behavior and functioning at home, at school and in the community so they can progress toward healthy personal growth.  We concretely gear this service to address the youth/adolescent’s daily functioning, focusing on impulse control and behavior management, emotional regulation, basic living skills, social skills, and decision-making skills.

Consonant with Solutions for Living’s intervention model philosophy, the mentoring/tracking modality is relationship based. The mentor/tracker forms a trusting relationship with the youth/adolescent by successfully working through any initial reluctance, allowing relationship testing, and validating genuine strengths and interests.  The combination of support and expectation provided by the youth mentor promotes self-respect and fosters accountability.  The mentor/tracker provides the youth/ adolescent with motivational support regarding school/job attendance and performance, medical/dental care, and recreational/leisure time.

Typically, the youth mentor works to ensure the youth’s increased accountability through face-to-face contacts and telephone check-in calls in accordance with their individual action plan. Sessions are conducted in school, at home and/or within the community. The sessions serve as the forum for the youth’s understanding of the relationship between thoughts, behaviors and feelings, for reality testing, and for the validation of self worth through positive feedback.  As part of the intervention, the youth  mentor maintains regular contact with parents, school personnel and the courts.  The focus on monitoring in this modality has been highly successful in helping youth/ adolescents develop increased accountability and a healthy sense of responsible independence. We accommodate the need for monitoring by focusing on the following goals:

• Ensuring the youth’s safety by establishing a structured environment, which includes appropriate educational programming, positive recreational activities and age-appropriate employment opportunities.
• Helping the youth/adolescent assume more age-appropriate responsibility and consequently become more accountable for his/her behavior in all settings.
• Helping parents improve their monitoring of the youth/adolescent’s whereabouts, behavior and daily functioning.

The Youth Mentor/Tracker Program, also provides 24-hour crisis coverage to youth and their families, with the emphasis on teaching portable crisis management skills.

Solutions for Living is excited to offer the GROW program to caregivers of children affected by trauma.  The GROW program can be integrated into either Solutions for Living’s Parent Mentor or Creating Solutions for Families support and stabilization programs.

What is Grow?

Grow is being offered as part of the Massachusetts Child Trauma Project (MCTP). The goal of MCTP is to improve placement stability and outcomes for children/youth who have experienced complex trauma and who are in DCF care. Grow is a caregiver skill building intervention designed to enhance resilient outcomes for families who are impacted by chronic adversity or stress (Kinniburgh et al. 2011). This parenting support program is delivered as a 12 session home visiting service by parent support workers or clinical staff providing safety and stabilization support. The home visiting hours include psychoeducation and skill practice in areas including but not limited to caregiver self care, attunement to the developmental impact of trauma, supporting child/youth regulation, effective parenting practices and strategies for building daily routines. Each session offers a mix of direct teaching, experiential learning and activity based skill practice.  The program is an adaptation of the ARC framework.

What is ARC?

The Attachment, Self-Regulation, and Competency (ARC) framework is a core-components treatment model, developed to provide a guiding framework for thoughtful clinical intervention with complexly traumatized youth and their caregiving systems.  Drawing from the fields of trauma, attachment, and child development, the framework recognizes the importance of working with the child-in-context, of acknowledging the role of historical experiences and adaptive responses in current presentation, and of intervening with the surrounding environment – whether primary caregivers or treatment system – to support and facilitate the child’s healthy growth and development.

ARC identifies three primary goals that need to be addressed with this population:

• The ability to build secure and healthy relationships;
• The ability to effectively understand and cope with emotions; and
• The ability to develop skills needed for resilient outcome.

Rather than identify step-by-step intervention strategies, the framework identifies 10 key “building blocks”, or intervention targets that will support the three primary goals, activities/strategies for intervening, developmental and cultural considerations, and potential applications across settings.

If you have questions about the GROW Program or the ARC framework please contact Kristine Kinniburgh, LCSW at kkinniburgh@jri.org

If you are interested in referring a family for the GROW intervention, please contact jschwalbach@solutionsforliving.org and the Family Networks lead agency.

Solutions for Living has been providing mediation services since 1976, when the agency’s founder Richard Bedine operationalized one of the first community mediation programs in Massachusetts.  The agency adapted its community mediation methodology to families in conflict in 1979, and has been operating a parent-child mediation program since then.  Its long-standing commitment to the concept of mediation applied to families has also taken the form of workshops for parents, teachers and students.

Family mediation is a voluntary, non-threatening, and confidential intervention, which promotes conflict resolution skills within the family unit through improved communication between parents and their pre-adolescent/adolescent children.

Family Mediation is an intervention primarily designed to forestall the escalation of conflict between parents and pre-adolescent/adolescent male and female children.  Generally, the dynamics characterizing these families are: the absence of age-appropriate discipline, the presence of unrealistic behavioral expectations, and/or a counterproductive style of communication.  Specifically, the identified population includes:

• Families in which a pre-adolescent/adolescent is at risk of being considered for substitute care due to failure to comply with parental guidance.
• Families in which a pre-adolescent/adolescent is returning home from substitute care.
• Foster or kinship placements in which a pre-adolescent/adolescent is experiencing adjustment difficulties.
• Families of adolescents whose oppositional, running and/or truant behaviors have resulted in or could result in a CRA petition.

Mediation sessions are conducted by certified mediators who are skilled in modeling constructive communication and experienced in helping mediation participants to draw upon their own strengths.  Sessions are held in an informal but structured atmosphere conducive to direct and open communication.  Family strengths are reinforced, and attitudes and behaviors that are conducive to improved communication styles are promoted.  The family is led through a process in which common ground is identified, with family members constructing their own mutually-beneficial behavioral agreement.