About Us.
The Daughter Project Girls' Home (DPGH) Short-Term Residential Therapeutic Program (STRTP) in Kern County, CA, serves as a safe place for youth to access, providing a positive therapeutic and social environment for youth to seek refuge, receive crisis intervention and case management, stabilize, and get connected to resources and services in the community. The mission of the DPGH is to create and maintain a safe, nurturing shelter that first meets the immediate basic needs of a youth in crisis, then, having done so, meets the specialized needs of at-risk youth by connecting them to a continuum of services to address their individual physical, emotional/ psychological, social, educational, environmental, and spiritual needs of the youth.
The DPGH STRTP is a 24/7 live-in facility which provides intervention and treatment services to girls ranging between 12-17 years old that have been identified as CSEC. The DPGH STRTP provides CSEC-informed trauma care and wraparound services to its youth residents, including physical and mental health assessments, screenings, and access to treatment, nutrition, creative arts, yoga, recreation, academic tutoring, girls’ empowerment programs, and CSEC-specific programs.
The purpose of the DPGH is to meet a gap in services for at-risk and highly vulnerable youth. No child should be in a circumstance where they are displaced from a home, vulnerable to being out on the streets, and thus vulnerable to further exploitation, abuse, neglect, and/or commercial sexual exploitation or trafficking.
Services
The DPGH provides the following services through our program as well as our local partners and Kern Behavioral Health and Recovery Services (KBHRS):
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Specialty mental health services.
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Substance abuse counseling programs and groups.
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Transition support services for youth and families, permanency, and permanency through reunification, guardianship or adoption.
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Educational, physical, behavioral and mental health supports such as school, exercise and eating healthy, receiving regular medical care and medical check-ups, managing inappropriate behavior and using coping skills to reduce frustration and anger, individual and group mental health counseling focusing on each youth's individual needs and CSEC education, awareness, intervention and prevention, including extracurricular activities and social supports to promote individual interests and healthy relationships.
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Activities designed to help youth achieve a successful adulthood such as education, vocational skills, domestic skills, money management and self-care activities.
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Services to achieve permanency, maintain/establish relationships with family members, maintain relationship with a youth's family.
Goals
Our goal is to provide trauma-informed and best practice services to youth who have been commercially sexually exploited from minority and underserved populations.
We aim to provide smooth transitions between a life of exploitation and an efficient continuum of care, taking into consideration victims’ histories of abuse, medical and psychotherapeutic needs, educational and career goals, and familial and other support outside of our program. Ultimately, we hope that girls leave the DPGH STRTP having renewed their sense of identity and purpose, and having removed themselves from an identity that is tied to one of exploitation. At the DPGH, girls are evaluated for their current situation, physically cared for, and counselled while their legal status is resolved.
At the micro level, the impact that the DPGH STRTP hopes to achieve is with the individual youth we serve. We aim to provide them with comprehensive services so that they might transition effectively into alternative forms of care, and eventually, independent living. More than a set of services, we hope to impact the individual lives of survivors by creating personalized plans of care for each of them, taking into consideration their own desires and needs as they have been assessed, and create a family-like environment in which those plans can be implemented and begin to be realized. The impact on youth, therefore, is not only that they receive a full package of services while in our care, but are empowered to realize an identity that is separate from their former abuse and to effectively move on to adulthood.
On a macro level, the DPGH STRTP hopes to break the so-called cycle of abuse in which many victims find themselves, or in other words, their susceptibility to re-victimization and return to their pimps or exploiters. We work with survivors who currently inform our programs, curricula, and training. We believe that survivors have the highest potential to create innovative and effective solutions to reducing the incidence and prevalence of human trafficking and improve victim services. The DPGH STRTP is also implementing an innovative program to improve the continuum of care that victims experience from their time at the DPGH STRTP and their transition into foster care or independent living. This program matches volunteer mentors from Kern County who meet and build relationships with youth on a regular basis.
Evaluation
The DPGH STRTP's programs are evaluated in a variety of ways. We use a logic-model based framework to understand the key components of our programs, how weaknesses can be addressed, and how strengths can be multiplied. Global Family believes that measuring outcomes is important to make programs more effective and sustainable, report to our donors and partners, promote an evidence-based approach, and create knowledge around the issue of human trafficking and effective service provision. We seek to understand how programs are implemented, the challenges that are faced, the inputs that are used, efficiencies and inefficiencies, which activities produce certain outcomes, and how outcomes are measured. In evaluating the services provided at the DPGH STRTP, we look at the effectiveness and efficiency in which our micro and macro goals, as well as long-term objectives, are achieved. This includes gathering data from youth, staff, and community partners.
Accreditation
We are accredited by the Joint Commission.
The Joint Commission accredits and certifies more than 22,000 health care programs worldwide and focuses on continually improving health care by setting the highest standards for health care quality throughout the world. In setting the standards, The Joint Commission consults doctors, nurses, and quality and safety experts to review the current standards and make recommendations for improvements. Accreditation and certification by The Joint Commission are considered the gold standard in health care. Specially trained health care professionals who are experts in their fields visited this facility to conduct a review that monitors how well our staff:
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Provide a safe environment for your care
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Educate you about the risks and options for your diagnosis and treatment
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Protect your rights as a patient, including your privacy rights
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Evaluate your condition, before, during and after diagnosis and treatment
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Protect you against infection
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Plan for emergency situations
