About the Nonprofit
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EmberHope Youthville (EHY) is a 501 C (3) nonprofit organization dedicated to impacting the lives of children, teens, & families. For more than 95 years, we have led the change for a healthy child, family, & community. Founded by the United Methodist Church more than 95 years ago, EmberHope Youthville began in the early 1920s with a gift from the estate of Mr. Edward P. Libbey. This gift, combined with funds from the City of Newton, Kansas enabled the purchase of 30 acres to build the Kansas Methodist Home for Children. In 1929, Libbey Hall, which included a kitchen, library, offices, & dormitories, opened for service. Six more residential cottages were added, including a school, chapel, & farm facilities. In the 1960s, we added a new name—Methodist Youthville—& a new focus: serving adolescent youth with emotional or social adjustment problems. In the 1970s, a family foster home program began in Newton. In 1996, our agency began serving youth & families as part of the Regions 4 & 5 foster care/reintegration contract in Western Kansas. 2013 expanded foster care into Texas. Our core values of faith, integrity, cultural sensitivity, respect, excellence, & accountability are essential to everything we do. We work with hundreds of donors, foster families, volunteers, businesses, churches, & foundations who want to help families inspire positive change to build a brighter future.
Our core services include foster care, licensed kinship care, residential, & Functional Family Therapy.
EmberHope Youthville strives to meet the need of any and every at-risk youth. We recruit, train, license, and support our foster families in providing specialized care for the specific needs of the children in our care. We utilize wrap-around services and hope to continually expand our services to ensure the success and wellbeing of all those we serve.
Additionally, EmberHope Youthville has applied to become a Therapeutic Family Foster Care provider for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. The model presented is a clinical model with in-home services to help youth with significant behavioral problems be successful in a family-like setting. Research findings indicate, youth who are not safely able to remain in their family of origin, and who cannot be placed with family, are more successful in a family setting. EmberHope Youthville will recruit, train, license, and support specialized foster families to serve high acuity youth, who may be without placement, to receive behavioral health services, while also focusing on the educational domain of functioning.