Casa Youth Shelter, last vocational visit; (week 4)

Casa Youth Shelter is a temporary shelter for troubled youth. The Casa can exist by community funding. 80% of the youth are reunited with there families. Everyone can knock on the shelters door. They work with a team of professionals and students of social studies from different Universities.

Because of private funding the Casa can accept youth with various (mental) problems. There is no grey area because the Casa have there own criteria. The Casa is not a residential treatment centre but they have a clinical department for conversations with a psychiatrist, family treatment, etc.

Casa is the only group home I visited with boys and girls mixed in one group. They told me that it is more realistic to mix them and they can learn from each other. A big downside about this method is the control system. Every 15 minutes there is a youth worker that checks where the youth is, 24 hours a day. This means that in the night time they shine there flashlights in the rooms of the teenagers to check if they are still there, don’t have sex, don’t use alcohol or drugs and don’t have any privacy. They tell me they have to because of laws.

When I ask them about the minimal influence the government has on youth care and the grey area/ tarket group this was the answer. ‘Within government funded youth care there is a big grey area. This is a problem the community can handle, the community is responsible to provide care for people, in this case teenagers, where no government care is involved. The community can start any program they like, what is necessary within the neighborhood. As long as communities keep doing this kind of work together there is no government involves necessary and the government knows this. This approach makes the community more responsible for each other’.

If you ask me, this is a positive view of the problem in the grey area. If you let a community decide what they need you make them more responsible, that’s a good thing but in a nation where power is everything who decides what is more necessary, short term shelter, residential care and cure or another hospital?