Intensive Services Foster Care

ChildNet’s Intensive Services Foster Care (ISFC) program provides specialized mental health and behavioral support services to children who have a history of complex traumas, psychiatric hospitalizations, and failed placements in the foster care system. ISFC is designed to offer a more normalizing living environment and increased opportunities for permanence, emphasizing careful foster family and child matching. ISFC utilizes the team approach when working with our youth, foster parents, birth parents and/or permanent caregivers, to help the youth transition out of residential care to the least-restrictive environment possible. Providing individualized mental health and behavioral support services in a family-based setting allows foster children to gain skills for future success in their living arrangement and preparation for successful transition into adulthood.

Foster children in ISFC are provided with a treatment team consisting of a therapist, client support counselor and foster care social worker who provide interventions in the home and community utilizing trauma-informed care. Therapists on ISFC teams provide Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavior Therapy as their primary treatment modality. The client support counselor offers individualized counseling and emotional support, mentoring and modeling skills for both child and foster parents. ChildNet’s ISFC social workers provide support for both child and foster parents, often advocating for the self-care, well-being, and continued training resources for ISFC foster parents’ continued personal growth. Foster parents are also provided with support from other ISFC foster parents both through individual consultations and during regularly scheduled foster parent support groups.