Programs

The Body Project is delivered to groups of 6-10 participants in 4 1-hour sessions by 1 or 2 facilitators. Participants complete a series of verbal, behavioral, and written activities in which they collectively explore the negative effects of pursuing the unrealistic appearance ideal espoused for women in U.S. culture. These activities are designed to reduce pursuit of the beauty ideal, which in turn aims to reduce body dissatisfaction, unhealthy dieting, negative affect, eating disorder symptoms, risk for future onset of eating disorders, and the harmful effects of social media use.

The Social Decision Making Program is a program which is designed to give students the tools they need to be happy, healthy, and productive global citizens, who achieve academically as well as socially.

It teaches children social and decision making skills they can use to make sound decisions, pursue healthy life choices, and avoid the serious social problems such as bullying, substance abuse, violence, and academic failure.

The goals of Social Decision Making Program are:

• To develop children's self control and social awareness skills (including, but not limited to: identifying, monitoring, and regulating stress and emotions, group cooperation, and the ability to develop positive peer relationships).
• To improve students' social decision-making and problem-solving skills by training educators, parents, and human service workers to be effective facilitators of those skills.
• To impact upon children's self-esteem and sense of self-efficacy by providing children with a problem-solving framework and social competencies upon which they can rely in stressful situations.
• To increase positive social behaviors and healthy life choices.

Teaching Kids to Cope (TKC) is a classroom-based group experience to promote and maintain mental health in adolescents through lecture, group discussions, role playing, brainstorming, handouts, group projects, and practice of problem-solving skills. Typical session topics will include:

• Learning to trust
• Developing a positive self image
• Identifying life stresses
• Identifying positive and negative ways of coping with stress.

Specific techniques for positive coping will be practiced in the group in relation to such stresses as family relationships, school problems, and peer relationships.

The Strengthening Families Program: For Parents and Youth 10-14 (SFP 10-14) is delivered in seven parent, youth, and family sessions using narrated videos portraying typical youth and parent situations with diverse families. The program is taught with 7-10 families over seven weeks for two hours each session. Parents and youth meet in separate groups for the first hour and together as families during the second hour to practice skills, play games, and do family projects. Sessions are highly interactive and include role-playing, discussions, learning games, and family projects.

This curriculum addresses youth risk such as: aggressive or withdrawn behavior, negative peer influence, poor school performance, lack of prosocial goals, and poor relationship with parents. Protective factors addressed include: positive future goals, peer pressure resistance skills, prosocial peer relationships, positive management of emotions, and empathy with parents.

The Blues Program is a brief manualized cognitive-behavioral prevention intervention for high school-aged adolescents with elevated depressive symptoms. The program consists of 6 weekly 1-hour group sessions and home practice assignments. Weekly sessions focus on building group rapport and increasing participant involvement in pleasant activities (all sessions), learning and practicing cognitive restructuring techniques (sessions 2-4), and developing response plans to future life stressors (sessions 5-6). In-session exercises help participants learn the program skills. Home practice assignments aim to reinforce the skills taught in the sessions and help participants learn how to apply these skills to their daily life.

The Supportive Virtual Family Time Program was created to support parents and children in foster or relative care in having positive virtual family time visits while they are unable to visit in person; for example, during the COVID-19 pandemic. This free program is designed to create structure, guidance, and training for those supervising virtual parent-child visits, with the goal of helping them facilitate positive remote supervised visits between parents and their children in out-of-home care. The program and training is geared toward both private agency supervised visitation providers as well as child welfare caseworkers who will be supervising these virtual visits.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a cognitive-behavioral treatment that was originally developed to treat chronically suicidal individuals diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). The four skills modules include two sets of acceptance-oriented skills (mindfulness and distress tolerance) and two sets of change-oriented skills (emotion regulation and interpersonal effectiveness).

Components of DBT:

• There are four components of comprehensive DBT: skills training group, individual treatment, DBT phone coaching, and consultation team.
• DBT skills training group is focused on enhancing clients' capabilities by teaching them behavioral skills. The group is run like a class where the group leader teaches the skills and assigns homework for clients to practice using the skills in their everyday lives. Groups meet on a weekly basis for approximately 2.5 hours and it takes 24 weeks to get through the full skills curriculum, which is often repeated to create a 1-year program. Briefer schedules that teach only a subset of the skills have also been developed for specific populations and settings.
• DBT individual therapy is focused on enhancing client motivation and helping clients to apply the skills to specific challenges and events in their lives. In the standard DBT model, individual therapy takes place once a week for approximately 60 minutes and runs concurrently with skills groups.
• DBT phone coaching is focused on providing clients with in-the-moment coaching on how to use skills to effectively cope with difficult situations that arise in their everyday lives. Clients can call their individual therapist between sessions to receive coaching at the times when they need help the most.
• DBT therapist consultation team is intended to be therapy for the therapists and to support DBT providers in their work with people who often have severe, complex, difficult-to-treat disorders. The consultation team is designed to help therapists stay motivated and competent so they can provide the best treatment possible. Teams typically meet weekly and are composed of individual therapists and group leaders who share responsibility for each client's care.

Creating Lasting Family Connections® (CLFC) is a family-focused program that aims to build the resiliency of youth aged 9 to 17 years and reduce the frequency of their alcohol and other drug (AOD) use. CLFC is implemented through a community system, such as churches, schools, recreation centers, and court-referred settings. The six modules of the CLFC curriculum, administered to parents/guardians and youth in18-20 weekly training sessions, focus on:

• Imparting knowledge and understanding about the use of alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs including tobacco
• Improving communication and conflict resolution skills
• Building coping mechanisms to resist negative social influences
• Encouraging the use of community services when personal or family problems arise
• Engendering self-knowledge, personal responsibility, and respect for others
• Delaying the onset and reducing the frequency of AOD use among participating youth

The program supports problem identification and referrals to other community services for participants when necessary.

Using a well-specified behavioral approach, FAIR treatment is individualized to fit the unique circumstances and needs of families presenting with opioid, methamphetamine, and other drugs of abuse. FAIR clinicians coordinate with child welfare staff to ensure that parents are meeting their child welfare treatment plan goals. Parents are incentivized to work toward their treatment goals that increase child safety and permanency. The model allows for service delivery within a flexible environment including meeting times and places (in-home, community, shelter). Sessions occur in the community where clients have the opportunity to practice success, and other places most likely for parenting to occur (e.g., home, school, playground, visitations). With the overall goal of creating safe and sober households, treatment includes a focus on addressing progress in the following areas:

• Substance abuse
• Mental health symptoms
• Parenting deficits
• Associated ancillary needs

The FAIR team is available 24/7 for on-call support and ongoing engagement strategies.

Pressley Ridge's Treatment Foster Care (PR-TFC) Pre-Service Curriculum is designed to be used by agencies to provide 30 hours of training to incoming treatment foster care (TFC) parents by going through all 10 units in the curriculum. Integrated multimedia resources within the curriculum include PowerPoint slides, video vignettes demonstrating therapeutic skills taught during training, and experiential activities (e.g., role plays). All trainers use the PR-TFC Pre-Service Curriculum training manual that provides clear objectives and requirements, and parents also receive a manual with training content, homework, and reading assignments. The PR-TFC Pre-Service Curriculum is a competency-based program rooted in social learning theory, behaviorism, working alliance, and trauma-informed care. The underlying beliefs of the curriculum focus on TFC parents as change agents for youth in their care. This means that TFC parents are taught that youth's behavior can change and how to teach youth the skills necessary for effective living.

Parenting Inside Out (PIO) is a cognitive-behavioral, group parenting skills training program based on the Oregon Social Learning Center's parent management training (PMT) program for at-risk families. PIO addresses the unique situation and issues of criminal-justice and systems-involved parents (substance abuse, child welfare). Group sessions introduce a set of core parenting practices (e.g., problem-solving, positive involvement, limit setting, monitoring, and nonviolent discipline), supporting skills (e.g., active communication, emotion regulation, emotion coaching), as well as child development, healthy family dynamics, and building relationships with children while separated. Parenting Coaches use interactive teaching skills (e.g., role play, group discussion, and problem-solving) to introduce and practice skills. There are three versions of the curriculum designed to fit different situations. The versions differ in the number of hours and some activities, and are designed for use in prisons, community settings (parents on parole or probation) and jails.

The Parent Connectors Program is a parent-to-parent support program delivered through weekly telephone calls to families of youth with emotional disturbance (ED) or at risk for emotional disturbance with the aim of improving academic and emotional functioning in youth.

Veteran peers are parents who have a child who has ED and who have had a history of relative success in negotiating the school and mental health systems, Veteran peers are recruited to serve as Parent Connectors (PCs). Once recruited, the PCs participate in a 16-hour training program consisting of didactic sessions, role playing, and sharing of experiences. Each PC is assigned approximately ten families to contact for about an hour each week by telephone and the PCs meet as a group weekly with a mental health professional (called a PC Coach) for supervision, support and to share experiences. The intervention is limited to 9 months.