Utah Youth Village

Families first - the families first program is a unique intensive in-home intervention for youth and families experiencing challenging life circumstances throughout utah. Village specialists, highly trained in the teaching family model, go into the home and ally with parents, teaching them impactful parenting skills so they can successfully guide their children through the evidence-based program. This program allows families to avoid the disruption of foster care, detention or psychiatric hospitalization. The families first team helped 511 families and provided services in every utah county for the first time in the program's history over the past year.

Therapeutic family homes - treatment foster parents live in their own private homes and are licensed and trained with utah youth village to provide treatment to youth between the ages of 0-21. The treatment parents in these homes are highly trained and closely supervised by a program consultant. They learn to use behavioral techniques and a structured program in their home to help foster children. Treatment parents work closely with biological parents, schools, caseworkers, therapists, courts, and others who are involved with the foster youth. Youth are referred to treatment foster homes by a variety of social service agencies, with the utah division of child and family services being the primary referral source. The youth referred are in need of a very structured setting as most of them have failed previous placements in less structured foster homes. The most common referral behaviors are school attendance and behavioral problems, authority conflicts, peer problems, anger/aggression control problems, sexual or physical abuse, neglect, running away, attention deficit or hyperactivity problems, and substance abuse. Treatment in foster care regularly helps youth successfully return to biological families, be placed with adoptive families, or moved to lower level of care foster homes.

Other support services - mentors work with youth throughout utah who are either in the custody of a state agency or living with family in the community. Most youth are referred by the state department of human services. Mentors do a wide variety of things, such as tutoring youth with academic needs, driving youth to important appointments when a guardian can't, reminding youth of previously acquired skills to help them deal with everyday situations, and spending time just having fun while youth learn relationship building skills. Mentors help youth in as many ways as caseworkers see a need and make requests, and mentors provide a positive influence in the lives of many youth daily. Having a mentor is an opportunity for at risk youth to have another caring adult in their lives, and as we know, every youth is just one caring adult away from being a success.

Other support services - smarter parenting is an extensive online resource where parents can learn effective, concrete, proven parenting skills included in the teaching family model. The smarter parenting website offers voluminous amounts of supportive resources which parents from all backgrounds can regularly make use of in order to achieve their specific parenting goals. Along with the website, smarter parenting also offers over 150 downloadable podcasts; a popular you tube channel with an extensive menu of parental tutorial videos, customized online coaching sessions with trained clinicians and individualized behavioral plans. Since its creation in 2012, the resources provided by the smarter parenting team have impacted over one million parents worldwide. Utah youth village has a registered national trademark on the name smarter parenting.

Families first dissemination is a program created to train, certify and support other agencies in the replication and implementation of our families first program.