Our Approach
The daily focus of our work is to protect children from further trauma, support their recovery and enhance their wellbeing. Three principles underpin our approach:
Harm caused by relationships is best healed by relationships.
That a child’s home and family, school and teachers, neighbourhood and friends all play a critical role in a child’s world and each system requires attention to improve a child’s quality of life.
Transformative environments that provide therapeutic relationships and experiences of belonging, mastery, independence and generosity are quicker and more effective for a child’s journey of recovery.
These principles are fully supported by recent brain science discoveries and the evidence base of multisystemic therapy and the therapeutic community movement.
Our Services
We know that some of the children referred to us today will not successfully recover without a planned and consistent therapeutic environment. They need to experience profound healing relationships, and see that everyone is working together to get to the heart of their difficulties in the context of everyday life, school and community. Our Children’s Villages provide this transformative experience.
Planned environments like our Children’s Villages are often referred to as ‘therapeutic communities’. In our Children’s Villages we strive to operate a model based on the principles of therapeutic community life where the care culture is intrinsically linked with the education culture. The provision of effective psycho-social support and therapeutic education requires that our community and residential social workers and teachers plan and work closely together in an integrated model of therapeutic intervention.
Stand Tū Māia is committed to continuing to provide therapeutic residential care and education component of our service and we continue to work hard to ensure this model of therapeutic intervention is safe, effective and sustainable.