Youth Villages offers a continuum of programs and services designed to help children with emotional and behavioral problems overcome their challenges and live successfully at home. Children are helped in the least restrictive setting possible -- preferably in their own homes.

If a child must receive out-of-home help, residential treatment occurs in the least restrictive setting possible for the shortest amount of time. Children who receive help on our intensive or lower level residential campuses can easily step down to less restrictive care in a group home or foster home as they make their journey home. In Tennessee, Youth Villages also operates an adoption program to help find permanent families for children if returning to birth families is not possible.

In reaching out to more than 30,000 children and their families over more than 20 years, Youth Villages has recorded success rates of around 80 percent -- compared with a 60 percent failure rate for traditional child welfare services. We measure our success in reunited families, in children who are able to live at home and do well in school.

Youth Villages specializes in finding solutions for children that others have given up on and take pride that we have never refused to help a child because his or her problems were too tough for us to tackle. We never give up on a child. If a child comes to one of our programs, we commit to doing "whatever it takes" to help that child.

Youth Villages has been a leader in the adoption and implementation of research-based treatment models and practices in the field of children's behavioral health. We use treatment practices that had been proven successful through clinical testing and in practical use. Soon after the organization was founded in 1986, Youth Villages adopted the Re-ED (Re-Education of Emotionally Disturbed Children) treatment philosophy. In 1994, with the development of the Youth Villages Intensive In-Home Services Program, the organization became one of the first in the United States to use Multisystemic Therapy (MST) outside of small clinical trials. Youth Villages is currently updating our residential, foster care and transitional living programs to incorporate the latest evidence concerning best practices for helping youth achieve long-term success.