Youth Home Inc.

It may seem that Youth Home has been around forever, and it has been for anyone younger than 45. Founded in 1965 as simply a group foster home, the mission was completely revamped in the 1980s to care for children ages 12 to 18 with psychiatric problems.
Often those psychiatric problems are a direct result of growing up in dangerously dysfunctional families, according to Chief Operating Officer David Napier.
“Most of the children have been abused either emotionally or physically, and the problems they have are because they’ve had to find ways to survive from day to day,” he said. “It’s eye-opening, it’s sad, but it’s also very fulfilling to work with a group of people who are helping them get out of those situations.”
And while not all of them will go on to productive lives, many do. “Just having a safe place and knowing people are trying to help them is a success to some degree. To have caring concern is a new experience for so many of these kids,” Napier said.
Youth Home currently has 70 children in its residential program and eight girls in a foster home in Hillcrest. Another 40 are clients of a day treatment program for children whose behavior problems keep them from succeeding in normal school settings.
While some of the children in the day program have private insurance to help cover the costs, very few of the residential clients are insured. Most are on Medicaid, which hasn’t had a cost-of-living increase in its reimbursement rates since 2001.
“Everything goes up, but our income has basically been fixed” at just over $11 million a year for the past several years, Napier said. “We are moving more and more into the private area, trying to find support there.”
Salaries have been frozen, the staff size has been frozen at about 240, fat has been trimmed from the budget and employees have been given additional duties.
“And because they believe in the mission, our team has been willing to do that. I’ve been very, very pleased with the way they’ve reacted to some of the things we’ve had to do,” Napier said.

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