The Ranch Ehrlo Society has expanded its Family Treatment Program (FTP) to two additional communities, Moose Jaw and Fort Qu’Appelle.
The nationally recognized program which was created in 2006, addresses the need for intensive in-home service provision to families in need of clinical treatment.
The program expanded several times over the years to allow more families to have access, but the latest growth has expanded the program that works to keep families together to the communities of Moose Jaw and Fort Qu’Appelle.
The Ranch Ehrlo Society says this expansion is due to greater demand from across the country. The program sees Ranch Ehrlo growing to allow six additional families to access the program in the neighbouring communities.
Sharon Miller, program manager at the Ranch Ehrlo Society, explained that the Family Treatment Program is a reunification program aimed at keeping biological families together as much as possible.
“We are a family reunification program whereas we work with families who are involved with child welfare which is where our referrals come from. They’re referred when children are in the care of the government — foster care or group homes and biological parents come forward in hopes of re-uniting with their children. So, we work with families, primarily the parents, but we’ve also worked with grandparents, aunts and uncles in the past. We work with the biological family and parents to reunify the children from care back into parental care.”
She continued, “our referral concerns focus on parental addictions, youth addictions, parental mental health, child behavior management and safety within the home environment. That’s typically the areas that we focus on to ensure that children can reside with biological family safely and they can be maintained in the home long-term. So, we work with parents on addressing the root issues that presented in the past that led to the children going into state care. We also work on family attachment and work on rebuilding those relationships as they are often destroyed when the child has ben placed in care for some period of time.”
The program provides support for families for up to six months and in some cases, more. Miller said Ehrlo provide service for families of all types.
“Our families on average, stay with us for a period of six months but we have provided services for families for a maximum of 18 months, which is the longest we’ve had a family in the program. We work with families with children ranging from newborns, all the way to 16-years-old. We work with all different dynamics of families — different cultural backgrounds, from different parts of Canada, rural and urban areas and we work with families who are single or dual parent families. We also work with families who’ve adopted children or foster.”
Expansion needed in rural communities
Miller explained that the there has been a great increase in demand for the Family Treatment Program in smaller communities like Moose Jaw. Hence, the organization decided to bring this service to people in their own communities. She said in many instances, people feel more comfortable in smaller settings rather than travelling to an urban centre for the services.
“There is no other program that works as intensively as ours with families on the reunification program,” Miller said. “We started in 2006 with two families and we’ve had six expansions up until this point where we’re currently serving 25 families with a growing demand. There is a real focus on keeping families together versus pulling children out of families and treating them separately from their families. So, this program enables us to do some work with the family as a whole to prevent children from spending any of that time in care.”
She added, “so, with the increase in demand for this program, we are trying to meet that demand but also trying to reach more of our rurally located families in a more comfortable environment. For some of our families, coming to Regina into an urban center is very uncomfortable for them. So, being in communities like Moose Jaw and Fort Qu’Appelle can have families feeling more comfortable, being that it is a smaller community and so that we can service families closer to their home and we can start connecting to resources that they will be in contact with long-term after our program is done.”
