Permanency: teens need parents, family and a network of committed adults.

Plummer Home helps youth achieve permanency - safe, stable and lifelong family relationships.  This ideally means staying in the group home only long enough to help them safely return to birth parents or relatives; or when that is not possible, to develop adoptive or legal guardianships.

Plummer Home also helps expand a youth's network of positive, healthy adult relationships.  Youth with a consistent, reliable and flexible network of committed adults have the greatest chance of sustained and productive involvement in family life and community into adulthood.

Plummer Home’s Permanency Practice Model

Believing that youth in residential care can achieve family permanency rather than “age-out,” Plummer Home is developing and piloting The Plummer Permanency Practice Model.  This practice model integrates three key intervention approaches:

·         Collaborative Problem-Solving, a Think:Kids[1] evidence-based practice for working with difficult behaviors displayed by youth in care.  This practice is based on the understanding that challenges posed by youth in care result from lagging cognitive skills (rather than poor motivation, manipulation, or attention-seeking) and are best addressed by teaching youth the skills they lack (rather than imposing punishment or a reward system).

·         Family Search and Engagement practices and tools pioneered by Catholic Community Services of Western Washington.[2]  This is a process that involves identifying and locating parents, relatives and family members to decrease youth’s loneliness, strengthen a sense of identity and belonging, increase each youth’s network of family connections and develop a safe, strong and lifelong parenting relationship

·         Preparing Children for Permanency by helping them clarify and come to grips with their life events, understand their membership in multiple “families” over the years and visualize what it would be like to be part of a permanent family. This involves answering many questions, such as Who am I?  What happened to me?  How will I know I belong?  Critical to this process is listening to the youth’s words, speaking the truth and recognizing pain as part of the process.[3]