Shelter Care -

Since September of 1972 when the first two shelter homes opened, the staff of Shelter Care remains committed to providing quality residential care to troubled children and families. In addition to the twenty-four hour a day residential needs, there is also a focus on the emotional, spiritual and social needs of each individual.

A staff of approximately ninety people and approximately sixty-five active volunteers, serve together in this program designed to meet the increasing needs that children and families are experiencing.

Wes Fair
Executive Director

The fiscal year 2008 – 2009, has been a year of both challenge and blessing. Shelter Care, Inc. continues to improve its programs, as well as, expand its services to meet the challenges and changing needs of the children, youth and families in our community.

Over this past year Shelter Care, Inc. has served approximately 879 youth and families. Of those youth and families, 44 stayed in our Shelter Home group home program, as well as our teen pregnancy home, The Highlands Teen Pregnancy Shelter. Safe Landing Youth Shelters provided residential services to over 593 youth and families. A total of 2,125 crisis calls were taken and 1,703 crisis counseling sessions were provided.

The Safe Landing Street Outreach Program has started out well in 2008 - 2009, and is now operating with a full team of Street Outreach workers. In the first six months of providing outreach help to homeless youth, over 3000 contacts were made, where we handed out survival kits, referral materials, clothing, food and other helps to those youth who are living on the street. We also saw runaway and homeless youth encountered by the Street Outreach team come to Safe Landing to receive residential services and move away from the dangers of the streets.

The Highlands Teen Pregnancy Shelter helped 16 pregnant or parenting teens and their infants over this past year. These teen mothers received a broad variety of services and helps geared towards educating them to make responsible and healthy decisions, and to insure the health and welfare of their infants. These numbers represent the clear and present need in Summit County for our services and the continued efforts of all of our staff to meet those needs.

Shelter Care, Inc. also had made a variety of marked improvements in terms of quality of services over this past year. We have improved our reporting and documentation of services, our staff evaluation, training reports, and developed more consistent review of strategic planning approaches. The Shelter Care, Inc. staff has also worked to stream line the referral process to timeliness and communications around youth entering our programs. These improvements have certainly added to the quality of our operations, as well as maintain our reputation of providing quality care with the public agencies that we serve throughout our community.

As we strive to move forward at Shelter Care, Inc., I am also cognizant of the many blessings we have received over this past year. Shelter Care, Inc. has an excellent staff, starting with our houseparents and residential care workers, who constantly display the patience and commitment to youth that is unmatched. We have started a new program providing Street Outreach services that has instantly made an impact on the community and identified a population of youth who are homeless and on the streets that need our helps. As we strive towards attaining accreditation through the Council on Accreditation, we have improved not only our internal operations but the over all functioning and communication with in our agency. Our funding base has become more diverse, as well as stable. As we move forward the challenges and the blessings of the past year will help us to continue providing quality services and meeting the needs for the children, youth and families of Summit County.