Who We Serve
Our ministry serves approximately 12 youth, and we seek to intervene in the lives of those living through childhood trauma and struggling to belong within a nurturing environment. Children who have experienced multiple adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are skilled at masking pain. Instead, it often comes through in ways that resemble misbehavior or ADHD.
Our experienced staff understand that when kids learn not to trust the adults entrusted to raise and care for them, they struggle to form positive, interpersonal relationships. Within a traditional school environment, their learning outcomes are profoundly stunted. Often, their behavior presents as acting out and they are often retraumatized by punishment and negative peer responses. Often, at-risk youth struggle to stay in school and often turn to substance abuse and other negative coping strategies because they lack a sense of purpose and fulfillment. These children need loving adults to come alongside them within a nurturing, Christ-centered, therapeutic environment.
The effective, research-based strategies employed by Elevation Family Ministries mirror those found within Therapeutic Communities. The three key elements of the community within Elevation Family Ministries are building a culture of belongingness, developing healthy interpersonal skills founded in Christ-like character development, and guiding those we serve towards spiritual formation.
Belongingness requires more than mere social contact. For the drive to belong to be satisfied, the contact must be frequent, stable over time, positive, and expressive of mutual concern (Pearce & Pickard, 2013). The Elevation Family Ministries leadership team understands belongingness is a core desire which leads traumatized youth to seek it wherever it can be found, in either positive or negative ways. While the need for belongingness can add to preexisting trauma, it can also facilitate recovery. A community reinforcement approach is touted throughout the literature as a method for recovery from childhood trauma (Meyers, Roozen, & Smith, 2011). Healing in the therapeutic setting of Elevation Family Ministries is a journey of exploration that takes time and hard work, facilitating connection, and integration with others. Interpersonal skills are essential to the development of lasting relationships. Children exposed to repeated instability and trauma struggle to develop skills necessary to form and maintain some quantity of lasting, positive, and significant interpersonal relationships. This development involves frequent, affectively pleasant interactions with a few other people, and these interactions must be in a stable and enduring framework of affective concern for each other’s welfare (Baumeister & Leary, 1995).
As a faith-based therapeutic community, Elevation Family Ministries bases all curricular and extracurricular activities around spiritual formation. Greenman (2010) defined spiritual formation as, “Our continuing response to the reality of God’s grace shaping us into the likeness of Jesus Christ, through the work of the Holy Spirit, in the community of faith, for the sake of the world” (p.24). Within our culture, reorientation to God is the focus within the context of community, and within such a culture, human recovery capital is formed. Human recovery capital is the sum of resources that an individual can draw on for support throughout the trauma recovery journey (Kelly & Hoeppner, 2015).