A Home Within

“One child – One therapist.” A Home Within is a start-up that offers pro bono individual psychotherapy to current and former foster youth “for as long as it takes”. Through its community based local chapters in 41 cities across the United States over 300 foster children are being helped. Highly qualified licensed mental health professionals provide this service to an “at risk” population without charge. Approximately 750,000 children in the U.S. spend time in foster care every year. Many move from home and facilities dozens of times before they “age out” of the social service system. The therapists volunteering for A Home Within provide an enormously important role in the lives of these children and youth – a long-term caring relationship that remains stable and intact despite multiple changes in residence.

A Home Within offers a Fostering Art program to foster teens and young adults. Fostering Art is a photography class targeted toward adolescent foster youth which offers an alternative to traditional psychotherapy by providing a creative outlet, a structured learning environment, instruction in photography skills, and the opportunity to share experiences with other foster youth.

A Home Within is currently developing a third program, Fostering Transitions, to provide support to teens that become parents while they are still in foster care themselves. The Program will have direct services to teach parenting skills and address the developmental challenges facing these young parents. The Program will also develop a curriculum that can be used to educate clinicians and others who work directly with these teen parents.

Advocacy is an essential part of the mission of A Home Within. The overarching goal is to transform the foster care system so that the policies and procedures affecting foster youth support the development of lasting healthy relationships.

The Social Entrepreneur: Toni Heineman

Toni Heineman is the founder and executive director of A Home Within. From the beginning of her career as a clinical psychologist, Toni’s practice included work with the San Francisco Dependency Court, along with children whose parents independently sought evaluation and treatment. Over time, the extraordinary difference between these two groups of children in her practice became increasingly evident. One day, out of frustration with the seemingly endless paperwork involved with seeing foster children, she wondered, “What if we just worked for free?” She discovered that a number of colleagues agreed that forgoing payment would allow them to focus on what they did best—provide psychotherapy. After meeting for about a year, they invited about 50 therapists in the Bay Area to join in this new venture and the Children’s Psychotherapy Project was launched. As word spread through presentations at professional meetings and publications in journals, colleagues in other communities around the country began asking how they could replicate the model. In 2001, A Home Within was incorporated.

Dr. Heineman is a clinical psychologist who has been in private practice treating children, adults, and families in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 30 years. She is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and was selected as a Fellow by Zero to Three for the 2003-2004 National Leadership Initiative. Toni has taught and supervised interns, graduate students and psychiatric residents and presented at numerous local and national professional meetings. She has authored a wide range of journal articles, a book, The Abused Child: Psychodynamic Understanding and Treatment; and is co-editor of another, Building A Home Within: Meeting the Emotional Needs of Children and Youth in Foster Care.

For further information about A Home Within go to www.ahomewithin.org