Holistic Alternative Parental Care
GHI exercises duly constituted substitute parental authority or guardianship over each child to create a family atmosphere with love, care, and understanding. This involves training the children in family values and teaching them the importance of family relationships. GHI provides home life needs, foundational training, monitoring of spiritual progress, and identification of children’s needs and problems.
The GHI model is based upon the Interdisciplinary model that integrates and generates an understanding of ideas and perspectives that cut across disciplines and the connection between these disciplines. It utilizes the resources of professionals from multiple fields to assess and meet the needs of clients. It is multifaceted in that it includes professionals from various disciplines, including medicine, social work, psychology, education, and child development to address the holistic needs of the client.
GHI uses the principles of Attachment Theory and Trauma Competent Caregiving to reduce the negative impacts of trauma and promote healing.
The GHI conceptual framework embodies the view that a child has a biological, psychological, social, emotional, and spiritual aspect. Using the perspective of strength and empowerment, GHI sees the child as having inherent rights, worth, and dignity. The child is seen as having the potential to respond to appropriate therapeutic care, heal, and develop into a functional adult. Views that focus on empowerment and participation are critical in providing intervention that will bring healing and produce growth in the child.
GHI Interdisciplinary Model
The Interdisciplinary Model, designed for the purpose of providing quality care, integrates the various departments of GHI to meet the holistic needs of each child. An Interdisciplinary Team is formed for each client based upon the individual needs of the child, with a representative from each department.
We believe that every child is created by God with a purpose. Their knowledge of God’s great love for them is crucial to their acceptance and understanding that despite the pain and sorrow they have experienced, there is hope and healing in His great love. To minister to a child holistically, means to reach their soul with the love of Jesus.
Regulates and monitors the case management of each client, working to advocate for the rights of the child, connect clients to partnering agencies and needed services, promote the welfare of the child, and provide counseling, direction, and when possible, assistance to the biological families to provide the best possible outcome for the future and best interest of each child.
Promotes the relational needs of each child, providing a safe environment and implementing the techniques of trauma-competent care to promote secure attachment and bonding.
Provides counseling, play therapy, and psychological services as needed to meet the emotional needs of children, as well as empowering them to heal and develop tools for overcoming their trauma histories.
Meets the cognitive needs of the client and promotes healing through learning and education, recognizing each child’s unique learning needs and individual differences.
Ensures the health and wellness of children in care and provides for the physical needs of the children through medicine, doctoral visits, surgeries and hospitalizations, and immunizations.
S.T.A.R. Care
Skilled Trauma Attachment Restoration (STAR) is the method developed and employed by Gentle Hands to ensure holistic, healing, and integrative services are supplied to each client in care.
Skills
Skills are necessary in addressing the issues that a child has is the first step in paving the way for healing to come. Understanding trauma and the impact that it can potentially have on any life, is the second step.
Trauma
Trauma comes from the Greek word meaning “wound” and can cover a vast array of human experiences of suffering, including mundane disappointments to catastrophic violence. Trauma destroys the social systems of care, protection, and meaning that support human life. Trauma can be acute, meaning it was experienced once or over a short period of time. Such cases include a natural disaster, rape, or witnessing a violent event. Chronic trauma is trauma that is repeated and experienced over a long period of time. This includes long-term physical and sexual abuse, combat, captivity, and repeated loss.
Attachment
Attachment is the foundation of all care at GHI, believing that early attachment will provide the connection and basis for all relationships in life. All staff are trained in attachment promoting behaviors and learn the skills to recognize trauma and how to use attachment to reach a child.
Restoration
Restoration is the belief that healing can come, and that healing will come. At its heart, Star Care works to bring children back to a place of functionality and a place where their potential that was God-given, can be realized.
