Intensive Family Intervention (IFI):

IFI is designed to be an intense service provided to children and adolescents that have substance abuse issues or severe emotional disturbances. These individuals are at high risk for out of home placement (RYDC, psychiatric hospital, therapeutic foster care, residential treatment facility, etc). 
This service is primarily provided to children and their families in their home. Our clinical staff will work with families to build on their strengths and empower them by equipping them with skills needed to meet the needs for the family and avoid out of home placement. IFI services focuses on the individual referred for services and their family as a unit. In reviewing the family’s strengths and needs, a holistic approach will be utilized to include peer, school and community factors in assessing the need for treatment. A Multi-systemic Therapy and Family Prevention approach will be the basis for treatment when appropriate interventions are used on an individual basis; the clinical team conducts a comprehensive assessment and strives to meet the client and their family where they are.

Additionally, IFI services aim to assist consumers and their families by stabilizing crisis, connecting consumers with external community resources, ensuring the appropriateness for clinical services, enhancing consumer’s ability to self care, and parents/legal guardians capacity to care for children in-home, in an effort to prevent out of home placement.

Our counseling services will be delivered through a flexible service team approach. Our team has the capacity to address concrete therapeutic, socio-cultural and environmental issues. After a comprehensive assessment is completed an assigned case worker and your family will partner to develop a treatment plan. Your family will have maximum input in the identified problems, goals, objectives, and interventions. Each team member will provide a support component that contributes to achieving consumer’s home, school or other locations in the community. Services will be intensive at initiation and will decrease in intensity as identified risks are reduced. First Step maintains positive working relationships with an access to external providers (psychologists, psychiatrists, medical doctors, etc.) and has the ability to make referrals for clients as needed. Our services are available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, through on-call arrangements. Our on-call staff is skilled in crisis intervention and a team response is available when a face-to-face intervention is required.

Community Support – Individual (CSI)

Community Support services consist of rehabilitative, environmental support and resources coordination considered essential to assist a youth and family in gaining access to necessary services and in creating environments that promote resiliency and support the emotional and functional growth and development of the youth.

This service is provided to youth in order to promote stability and build towards age- appropriate functioning in their daily environment. Stability is measured by a decreased number of hospitalizations, by decreased frequency and duration of crisis episodes and by increased and/or stable participation in school and community activities. Supports based on the youth’s needs are used to promote resiliency while understanding the effects of the emotional disturbance and/or substance use/abuse and to promote functioning at an age- appropriate level. The Community Support staff will serve as the primary coordinator of behavioral health services and will provide linkage to community; general entitlements; and psychiatric, substance use/abuse, medical services, crisis prevention and intervention services.

Individual Counseling

A therapeutic intervention or counseling service shown to be successful with identified youth populations, diagnoses and service needs, provided by a qualified clinician. Techniques employed involve the principles, methods and procedures of counseling that assist the youth in identifying and resolving personal, social, vocational, intrapersonal and interpersonal concerns.

Family Counseling

A therapeutic intervention or counseling service shown to be successful with identified family populations, diagnoses and service needs, provided by a qualified clinician or practitioner. Services are directed toward achievement of specific goals defined by the individual consumer and targeted to the consumer-identified family and specified in the Individualized Recovery Plan (note: although interventions may involve the family, the focus or primary beneficiary of intervention must always be the individual consumer). Family counseling provides systematic interactions between the identified individual consumer, staff and the individual's identified family members directed toward the restoration, development, enhancement or maintenance of functioning of the identified consumer/family unit. This includes support of the family and specific therapeutic interventions/activities to enhance family roles; relationships, communication and functioning that promote the recovery of the individual.

Click here to view a list of the many mental health illnesses First Step counsels and their symptoms.