We provide young people with:
Basics: comfortable accommodation, a safe environment, healthy diet, playtime and leisure opportunities.
Coping strategies: we help young people to understand boundaries, solve problems, foster individual interests, learn self-management and build courage and hope.
Learning: we create a learning environment for young people, both at school and in our homes. We support young people to make education work for them, prepare a career plan, learn to organise their own life, celebrate achievements and develop life skills.
Belonging: we provide a nurturing environment where young people feel secure enough to form appropriate relationships with others, thus creating a support system around them. We support young people to make appropriate friends and learn social responsibilities. Whilst we try to create belonging, we always keep in mind the individual’s background and their life experience before they came to us. We try to resolve young people’s patterns of self-harming behaviour and addiction problems in an environment where they do not feel rejected.
Shape young people’s core self: by encouraging hope, understanding other people’s and their own feelings, learning to take responsibility for their own behaviour, encouraging individual interests and talents, giving them the confidence to feel safe enough to take calculated risks in discussion with carers.
Our therapeutic practice is influenced by the ‘Self Actualisation’ principle and the belief that anti-social emotions result from frustrations of the more basic impulses of love, security and belonging.
To achieve these outcomes, Greenfields provides an integrated approach, which includes:
- Professional therapeutic intervention by qualified practitioners
- Individualised healthcare and education opportunities
- Safety, with a clear child protection and complaint procedure
- Emotional warmth by showing unconditional regard
- Stimulation in the form of an individualised activity programme
- Appropriate guidance regarding rights and responsibilities
- Consistent boundaries and structure
- Stability – by offering a ‘no rejection’ policy (subject to Risk Assessment and Child Protection Implications)
- Working in good partnership with young people, their families (as appropriate) and other agencies in order to create confidence in young people
We do not ignore the influence of behavioural science whilst caring for young people whose behaviour is often preventing them from having a fulfilling life. By using the principle of ‘learning’, we try to bring about changes in young people’s behaviour.
Our Activity Reward Scheme is based on the theory that residents have the opportunity to decide their own rewards and choose the path they need to take to achieve their chosen rewards. This process, although designed to exercise a measure of control, is empowering to young people. We believe that this method of conditioning, based on positive reinforcements, can ‘shape’ desired behaviour.
Should young people and their placing Authorities desire a more formalised therapy, we are able to refer them to our external panel, which includes a psychotherapist, art therapist and clinical psychologist
