Host Families Key to Venture Academy’s Success

Candi Rowney has yet to meet a troubled teen she couldn’t help and if she ever does then her days as a host parent for Venture Academy will be numbered.

“I look at every teen who comes into my home as in need of, and deserving of, help. If I didn’t then I wouldn’t be doing my job,” Rowney says. “They need assistance to learn new and better ways to face their challenges and manage their difficulties.”

Rowney is a veteran host parent who provides troubled teens with a safe, controlled home environment where they can learn to live with rules and boundaries designed to help them recover from problems that may include drug and alcohol addiction. Her role, as a member of the Venture Academy team, is to provide a stable environment where youth can establish healthy behaviours and routines.

“My job is to help them make better choices and improve their behaviour and to do that by communicating with them at a person-to-person level,” she says. “I don’t take things personally and I don’t get offended when they get mad at me because they came here for those reasons and it is my job to help them deal with issues in a new, more constructive way.”

Rowney provides youth with a loving but structured environment where they can reestablish a healthy routine that includes eating well, doing chores, exercising regularly, and getting enough sleep.

A key component of each teen’s treatment is the development of an attachment plan focused on developing bonds with Venture Academy staff that will eventually be transferred back to the parents.

Clinical Director Connie Buckle says having teens stay in private homes with trained host parents is key to rebuilding attachment and working towards sustainable change.

“When we look at kids who’ve come from homes where they’ve experienced a lot of conflict we find they are often more peer oriented and disconnected from family,” Buckle said. “What we do in our host family homes is focus on building relationships and attachments and then lending that attachment back to the child’s family when they return home so they can have a better relationship and thereby less conflict.”

Rowney says most teens come to realize their parent’s rules and expectations were actually reasonable. Once that happens, Rowney works on building adult-teen bonds that will eventually be transferred to the parents.

“These kids have disconnected from the positive adults in their lives and what we do is build a bond that they can then transfer to their parents as they work on rebuilding a new more healthy relationship,” she said. “The key is not my developing a bond with a teen. It’s transferring that bond back to the family.”

Saying goodbye to the youth she cares for is both the best and the worst part of the job, Rowney says.

“When you have youth coming into your home who are in trouble or having issues and they come in with their head down and they walk out with their head up, that says it all,” Rowney says. “There is nothing more rewarding than watching them go home, take accountability and take charge of their own life.”