About the Nonprofit
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A Better Way (ABW) serves the San Francisco Bay Area with high quality services to children in, or at risk of entering, foster care, and their families. ABW empowers children and families to develop the insights, life skills, and permanent relationships that promote their social, emotional, educational, and economic well-being.
Founded in 1996, ABW has grown into a comprehensive provider of foster/adoption, Mental Health, parent advocacy, and training services with organizational values of: Family Empowerment, Successful Outcomes, Cultural Humility, Community Collaboration, and maintaining a Highly Professional Workforce. By embodying these values every day, ABW can provide unmatched services to the families served. Today, ABW has extended its reach into six counties.
ABW’s core services fall into four major categories: Behavioral Health, Foster Care Services, Family Strengthening, and Parent Advocacy. All of the services in each of these categories are designed to provide Foster Youth with the tools and resources necessary to achieve their highest and best quality-of-life. Services are designed to be holistic to the youth and to the family (be it natural, Foster, or adoptive) to eliminate generational and societal barriers to success.
ABW focuses on full-family solutions including behavioral health services for children and parents, parenting classes, and training programs for other professionals to create more paths to success. ABW is one of a select few organizations with expertise in assessing and providing behavioral health services to children ages 0-5 that are involved in the social services system.
ABW is honored to be the contracted provider for behavioral health services to the counties of San Francisco, Solano, Alameda, Santa Cruz, and Contra Costa. Each of these counties has selected ABW through a competitive process and then subsequently renewed based on superior performance.
Community collaboration is at the heart of everything that ABW does. Physical health professionals, attorneys, other agency service providers, criminal justice system and child welfare system staff, school personnel, and families are critical partners for the goals of the child to be reached.
ABW also relies on partners to provide services that ABW is not well-suited to provide. Connecting a family to housing opportunities, job training, access to food, medicine, and other basic needs is something that ABW readily does through referrals to agencies specializing in those areas. We believe that no one agency may be all things to all people and that working together is the only way to achieve the results that everyone hopes for.