Foster Care

Every child needs and deserves to grow up safe and protected from abuse and neglect. Caring foster parents offer children support and stability when they need it most. They provide care and support and help them with emotional and behavioral issues that result from the traumas they’ve experienced.

Camelot specializes in higher level foster care for children and adolescents that may need extra support. For that reason we partner with our foster parents/homes to provide trauma informed care and additional services, including in-home counseling, tele-psychiatry and therapeutic mentoring.

Our most successful foster parents are open-minded, dependable, patient and willing to try different parenting styles for children with different needs. Having a flexible schedule, being tolerant and demonstrating the ability to work as a member of our team are all important qualities for success.

Foster families willing and able to accommodate sibling groups are in high demand, as are those who are able to take older children and teens. Children aged birth to 21 may need foster care for just a few months, or may be in placement for longer than a year, while others may have a longer term goal of adoption or guardianship. Youth in foster care are diverse in background and experience:

  • Some children are stepping down from residential treatment
  • Some have developmental delays
  • Many have suffered abuse
  • Others have never benefited from expectations or structure
  • Most have built walls around themselves to keep out the hurt.
  • All have lost their homes and families
Our training and support to foster parents is valuable when helping a child who has known such pain and upheaval.

Camelot can help you become a licensed foster parent and provide support as you open your heart to children in need of a safe, loving home. We stand alongside our foster parents to ensure they have the resources and support they need to care for the children temporarily placed in their homes.

Counseling

Whether a youth is experiencing depression or bi-polar disorder and has significant impairments in functioning in their natural setting, Camelot’s In-Home Counseling Program can assist in developing skills and strategies to improve functioning. Our counselors meet youth in the community, schools and in the foster home to provide support in their natural environment, with a goal of helping maintain consistency and stability.

Many children and adults have experienced trauma, but this especially true with children and adolescents in the child welfare system. Trauma is an emotional shock that creates significant and lasting damage to a person’s mental, physical and emotional growth. The primary goals of trauma-informed therapy are empowerment and recovery through a collaborative relationship.

Rooted in trauma informed care, our counseling program utilizes evidence-based practices focused on trauma as well as other treatment approaches to create solutions and to enhance recovery. Counselors draw on their professional training and skills to meet the unique needs of each individual, couple or family.

The program is specifically designed to offer individual and family therapy, community support, treatment planning and case coordination services to stabilize the youth in the community.

Therapeutic Mentoring

Therapeutic Mentoring services are community based intensive training on daily living, social or communication skills. Therapeutic mentors can assist youth to find, nurture and exercise their strengths. Often times the struggles that a child faces pour over into other aspects of their life. All of these things can have long-lived repercussions on a child’s life if not dealt with and worked through. Through the use of a therapeutic mentor, activities are chosen based on the youth’s needs or the unique challenges they are dealing with. The goal is to improve interpersonal relationship skills in their school, home life, parental interactions, and sibling relationships.  

Skills worked on can include:

  • Anger Management
  • Social Skills
  • Coping Skills
  • Self-Esteem
  • Communication Skills

Extended Family Support

The Extended Family Support program provides services to stabilize the home of a relative caregiver who has been caring for children when their biological parents are no longer able to. The services help avoid the relative and child involvement in the child welfare system and any disruption of the family placement..

Services provided include:

  • Help obtaining guardianship and addressing legal authority
  • Help obtaining a child only grant, subsidized day care and other entitlements
  • Assistance with financial and housing issues
  • Help enrolling children in the school district where the relative caregiver lives
  • Cash and in-kind assistance for items needed to stabilize the household
  • Identifies other needed services available in the community