Tidewater Youth Services Commission

Tidewater Youth Services Commission, based in Portsmouth, Virginia, is an organization that provides a holistic program designed to help at-risk adolescents. Their program is flexible and covers prevention and rehabilitation from a number of risky behaviors, including problems with substance abuse.

They have several streams of income funding them including public funding and the Tidewater Youth Services Foundation, a non-profit organization. These income streams allow the Commission to keep their fees lower than they would otherwise be. Participants’ fees vary based on the services provided to them.

Their Tidewater Juvenile Substance Abuse Program is what they offer to teens who struggle with substance abuse and the criminal consequences that usually surround it. The program employs cognitive behavioral therapy with the goal of teaching participants how to deal with temptation and how to avoid substance use. They operate to direct at-risk adolescents away from juvenile detention and other such consequences so their services are best suited to those who need far more intensive intervention than a typical outpatient.

What’s great about their program is that they have two live-in homes for boys and another emergency shelter for all teens between the ages of 13 and 17. This allows them to give some participants intense attention which includes an aggression replacement program to help teens develop anger management and other social skills. Beyond this, they also have four other programs to help teens deal with problems associated with unstable home environments, probation, and parole.

Because they regularly deal with some of the toughest problems adolescents might face, their operating principles combine flexibility with the highest ethical standards. Their goal is to help every person develop within the familial context so that they can grow to be self sufficient as time goes on, either as they transition back into living with family or move on to independence.