WESTCOAST CHILDRENS CLINIC
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Mission Statement
WestCoast Children’s Clinic is committed to providing psychological services to vulnerable children, youth, and their families regardless of their ability to pay and to expanding the reach of psychological services through practice and research. To ensure the ongoing availability of these services, WestCoast is dedicated to training the next generation of mental health professionals.
About This Cause
Who We See Annually we serve over 1,700 children who are living at or below the poverty level. Our clients have experienced physical or sexual abuse, neglect, disrupted attachments to caregivers, and/or community violence. Most have been removed from their families due to abuse or neglect. Sixty-five percent are currently in foster care, with the remaining at risk of entering foster care. What We Do While many are familiar with the impact of trauma on children, there is often disagreement about what helps. Research clearly shows is the need for at least one important person in a child’s life, someone to talk to when things fall apart and to help them see themselves and their possibilities differently. For each of our 1,700 children– from the child who comes to the Assessment Center in the first hour after being removed from his family, to the teen preparing to live on her own after foster care– we provide that one person. Clinical Programs WestCoast provides mental health services through five specialized programs. Our interventions vary in scope and range, bound by a commitment to meet our clients’ needs: Assessment Program: Relatives, foster parents, teachers, and social workers may notice when things aren’t going well for a child but often don’t understand why or what can be done to help. Our assessment process combines psychological testing with practical interventions to help children and their families better understand symptoms and behaviors. Outpatient Therapy Program: Our Outpatient Therapy Program provides long-term individual and family psychotherapy, parent guidance, and clinical case management services. We provide mobile and clinic-based therapy to children ages 2-21. Catch-21: Helping Youth Out: Some adolescents need extra support during their transition from psychiatric hospitalization to living as independent adults. Our Catch-21 program helps youth make that move. C-Change: Every night, roughly 100 girls are sold for sex on the streets of Oakland. Our C-Change program, meets the mental health needs of girls who have been victims of child sex trafficking. STAT (Screening, Stabilization and Transition Program): Our STAT program provides 24/7 first response mental health services to children when they are first removed from their homes due to abuse or neglect. We continue to work with them to ease their transition to into foster care. Policy, Research, and Training Our clinical work drives our research and policy agenda. For example, data from our C-Change Program (75% of youth are trafficked for 2 to 3 years before adults recognize it) pointed to the need for a simple screening tool to identify potential and current victims of commercial sexual exploitation. WestCoast developed the Commercial Sexual Exploitation - Identification Tool (CSE-IT and trained over 5,000 service providers in 5 states to recognize the signs of exploitation using the CSE-IT. This far over 28,000 youth have been screened, and 2,950 youth were identified with clear signs of trafficking. Westcoast was also pivotal in providing the support, data, and testimony to pass Senate Bill 1322 in 2016, which ended the practice of arresting and charging children for prostitution.