Red Hook Initiative
We work with young people in Red Hook to support their healing by providing counseling and supportive services in a nonclinical community-based setting. We aim to break down the stigma surrounding access to wellness care.
Our Approach
The Health & Wellness Team provides participants with a central point for wellness support and resources at Red Hook Initiative. We view wellness as multi-faceted and seek to build an ecosystem of healing for residents of Red Hook and its youth. Our work at the individual, group, and community levels intends to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline by helping youth achieve self-actualization, reach better outcomes, and create a safer and healthier community that moves from surviving to thriving. We are working to embed healing into our day-to-day work with young people and we’re committed to reducing the organizational barriers between the youth we serve and the emotional health and healing support they need.
Health & Wellness
Individual Support
The team collaborates with participants to provide referrals, resources, and orientation on mental health and wellness services. We do this by providing Wellness Sessions, Individual Counseling, and Crisis Management. Counseling is an opportunity to have a counselor support you in exploring yourself, your desires, needs and wants and your place in the world. It is also an opportunity to practice preferred or new ways of being. Our team considers counseling an opportunity to shift away from problem solving (except when urgent) to sitting with unknowns to find new routes to healing.
Peer Healing Groups
Our Peer Healing Program is a multi-tiered group healing offering that provides an alternative to individual services. While collaboratively cultivating a space for group healing, the Peer Healing program simultaneously coaches young residents of Red Hook by providing peer support training in hopes of building relational culture and community.
Ecosystem of Social and Emotional Wellbeing
We collaborate with internal and external stakeholders to create and sustain an ecosystem of social and emotional wellbeing for our participants. We facilitate psychoeducational workshops throughout the year to bring awareness and support to empowering our participants and the community to be in charge of their wellbeing. We support internal teams in case conferences that address observed overarching themes with our participants or to assist in engaging them further. Staff members are also engaged in Healing Justice and other training that will inform their work with Red Hook and its community members. And finally, we partner with external organizations to ensure continuity of care for our participants.
