Beginning this year, Cornerstones of Care embarks on a new strategic plan designed to assess our resources and move toward prevention by providing the best possible care with the least disruption to families.

The Bridging Forward plan is designed to provide flexibility to transition to new opportunities while maintaining core aspirations toward the children, families, and communities we serve. The plan, created with input from all Cornerstones of Care team members, looks to continue to develop the resources offered to help children and families heal from trauma.

“Bridging Forward is our commitment to care for the children and families we currently serve while exploring ways to diversify our work to more effectively help more people,” said Cornerstones of Care President and CEO Merideth Rose.

The Executive Leadership Team is assessing programs and innovation to provide the best possible tools for children and families healing from trauma. Cornerstones of Care will continue its traditional work in foster care and adoption but is increasing its focus to expand programs such as Build Trybe, which provides marketable job skills to youth as they transition out of foster care.

Skill development is part of the agency’s commitment to prevention. In the case of Build Trybe, the goal is to reduce chronic unemployment, homelessness, and food insecurity that too many youth face after aging out of foster care.

In other instances, prevention means continuing to take the least disruptive path to working through trauma. For example, our Kansas team reduced the number of youth removed from homes by 36 percent in our foster care work in Wyandotte, Leavenworth, and Atchison counties.

“Our goal is to engage with families in ways that don’t begin with a hotline call and safety concerns,” said Chief Programs and Innovation Officer Justin Horton. “We want to help at a community level before state child welfare system intervention is necessary.”

To that end, Cornerstones of Care is continuing its Kansas work in Functional Family Therapy, which can be accessed by families outside the child welfare system, and in Family Preservation. Our outpatient therapy programs in Missouri have expanded from one school district to three and are beginning to provide therapy to students in Eastern Missouri.

This year, thanks to a $750,000 grant from the St. Louis County Children’s Service Fund, Cornerstones of Care is expanding its impact in St. Louis schools. This grant will fund two new therapist positions to provide trauma-informed therapeutic counseling services and brings Behavior Intervention Support Team (BIST) services to 11 buildings in the Hazelwood School District.

“I am reminded of the quote by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who said, ‘There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in,’” said Merideth. “With our new strategic plan, we want to prevent compounding trauma and sharpen our response to it.”