Community Based Services

Pinebrook offers an array of community-based programs designed to provide assistance to families in their homes and throughout their community. By providing services in this manner, they are more accessible and effective and ultimately more likely to either prevent the need for out-of-home placement of children or facilitate successful family reunification for children who are in an out-of-home placement. Community-Based Programs include:

• Making the Grade
  
• Family Life Education (Individual and Psychoeducational Groups)
  
• Transportation and Family Visitation

Pinebrook wishes to thank its community partner, the United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley for believing in the agency’s Making the Grade truancy reduction/family support program. The United Way’s generous award of $45,000 for the next three years during its 2011/2014 Community Investment Cycle will enable Pinebrook to begin realizing its goal of expanding Making the Grade from a small pilot initiative to a program serving 50 children and their families a year in the Allentown School District.

Making the Grade
Funded in part by United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley, Making the Grade is a best practice truancy-reduction, family support program for elementary and middle school youth attending first through eighth grades determined by the school to be truant or at-risk of dropping out.

The goal is to improve school attendance and enhance family functioning by identifying the youth and families' strengths, needs, and risk-factors contributing to illegal absences; and developing a Truancy Action Plan to provide support, information, referrals and intervention.

Referrals are accepted primarily from school districts in the Lehigh Valley, District Justices, County Offices of Children and Youth Services, Mental Health/Intellectual Disabilities, Drug and Alcohol (D&A), and Juvenile Probation.

Click on Pinebrook’s Making the Grade Program Brochure and 2010/2011 Program Report to view. For more information, please contact Michael Daniels, Program Supervisor, at 610-432-3919 or email .

Family Life Education
The Family Life Education program is designed to provide a supportive, shared learning experience to help families better understand and deal with problems of family living, promote the parenting skills development/enhancement necessary to maximize the strengths of those parenting or preparing to parent, and to respect the uniqueness and integrity of each family.

These services are provided in group settings throughout the community or in individual sessions in the family’s own home and address the skill-development needs of parenting adults, pregnant and/or parenting teens, including those incarcerated, in substance abuse treatment/recovery, those with intellectual limitations or mental health illness, parents with limited English proficiency or speak Spanish predominantly.

With an emphasis on promoting growth and personal development in the area of responsible parenting and other life-skills training, topics are presented through structured activities with the provision of information using handouts, worksheets, educational videos, and modeling of appropriate behavior.

The evidence-based Nurturing Parenting curriculum is used with all participants. Sessions cover topics such as:

• The Basics of Child Development
  
• Feelings
  
• Self-Esteem
  
• Communication and Problem Solving
  
• Managing Stress
  
• Guiding Behavior/Discipline Techniques
  
• Establishing Family Routines and Structure

In addition, outcome measures are used to assess the skill growth of participants in various areas of parenting.

Click on Pinebrook's Individual Family Life Education Parenting Classes and Together Families Program to view program brochures. To learn more about our Family Life Education Services, please contact Michael Daniels, Program Supervisor by phone (610) 432-3919 or by email at .

Transportation and Family Visitation Program (TVP)
The Family Visitation/Transportation Program is a collaborative program designed to provide transportation to and supervision of visitation between children in substitute care and their non-custodial parents or other relatives. This is accomplished by:

1. providing transportation for the children and/or families to designated places for their visits. These could include the biological family’s residence, a relative’s home, a Pinebrook Family Services or County Children and Youth offices, a residential facility, or other specified locations, including sites outside the family’s county of residence. Visits can occur during weekdays, weeknights, holidays and weekends at a time mutually agreed upon by Pinebrook, the Children and Youth agency and the family.
   
2. supervising or monitoring the visit and making appropriate interventions throughout the visit to ensure the emotional and physical safety of the participants. If close supervision of a family were not warranted, staff would nevertheless remain in close proximity to the visit site to be available to the family and children, if needed.

Additional support is offered to families through a program of “facilitative supervision” that would include parenting skills education, coaching and modeling of appropriate parental behavior as well as visit reports and court testimony.

Click here to view Pinebrook's Transportation and Visitation Program Brochure. For more information, please contact Courtney Fein, Program Supervisor, at 610-559-8151 or email .