The work

Families Renewed, Inc.

A faith-based 501(c)(3) built on a plain observation: families rarely come apart all at once. They come apart quietly, over months, in the window before anyone official is paying attention. That window is where we work.

I founded the organization and serve as its chairman and chief executive. We are based in York, Pennsylvania.

It is the mission of Families Renewed, Inc. to provide relief to children and families suffering from the trauma caused by the break down of the family structure by renewing the family support systems that are at the core of a child’s sense of safety and security.

Why the name changed

From rescue to prevention

The old name said exactly what I was. I was in rescue mode. I have been a rescuer my whole life — the crisis line at fourteen, twenty years on the ambulance, search and rescue. It is the thing I am good at.

Then I did what I always do, which is look hard at whether the work was actually working. No single case changed my mind. It was several years and a great many families, and this is what I concluded: as long as you are rescuing people, there will always be someone to rescue. You help a family and that family is genuinely better off — and then they end up back in it, or another family takes their place. The line never gets shorter. Rescue meets people at the bottom. It does not reduce the number of people who arrive there.

Two climbers on Chickies Rock

Years ago I was rappelling with our fire department’s search and rescue team off Chickies Rock. A man had been watching us for fifteen or twenty minutes when he spoke up: “You fellows have a lot of equipment, don’t you?” We allowed that we did, with rather more chest than the question called for. Then he asked whether we ever helped people who needed rescuing. That, we told him, is the entire reason we exist.

So he said: two friends of mine are free-climbing the face over there and they are stuck. They cannot go up and they cannot go down.

We called it in, went over the side, picked them off and brought them to the bottom. A park ranger was waiting down there and wrote them both tickets, because nobody was supposed to be climbing that face to begin with.

And as we were packing up our gear, I looked over and watched the two of them start back up the same rock.

What we do instead

That is what rescue looks like when it is only rescue. You take control, you solve it, you hand it back, and the person goes straight back to the rock. The key is to make the family part of the solution.

So a household comes to us needing rent. We look, and often they can in fact afford the rent — what they cannot afford is the electric bill. So we pay the electric bill, they pay their own rent, and we teach the money management that keeps them off that rock next time.

Sometimes there is no time for any of that. When a family is hours from eviction you rescue them, and we do. But that is the exception we are working to prevent, not the plan. The plan is that a family leaves with the tools not to be here again.

We changed the name because we changed the model. American Family Crisis Ministry became Families Renewed.

Inside our largest program

Why LifeBST exists

LifeBST sits at the centre of our suicide and self-harm prevention work. Here is the reasoning behind it.

Something happens to a child. Whether I would call it trauma does not matter. Whether you would call it trauma does not matter. What matters is that it was trauma to the child who lived it.

That child adapts to it as best they can, and the adaptation is often worse than the wound. Then it goes underground. It stays down through the elementary years while the child carries it, and it surfaces somewhere around twelve, thirteen, fourteen — all at once, along with whatever grew down there in the dark. By the time anybody can see a problem we are years late, and a great deal of suffering has already happened in between.

That is a timing problem, and it is why the answer has to be a school curriculum. School is the only place you reach every child early enough to matter.

Where the method came from

Dialectical behavior therapy has two halves. There is a therapeutic half — I call it the couch portion — and there is a skills half. The skills are the part that lets a person meet the next hard thing without ending up back where they started.

So take the skills out and teach them to everybody, before anyone needs them. That is LifeBST. It is skills education, not treatment, and the distinction is deliberate: we are not putting therapy into classrooms. We are teaching the skills that therapy would otherwise have to teach later, after the damage.

I did not know at the start whether any of it would hold up. A team of eight people from WellSpan got on a call with me, and one of them — who knew DBT far better than I did — told me the thing I did not know: the skills approach is already evidence-based. It is already known to work. She pointed me at the research, and everything since has been built on that footing.