Alternative Family Services
Alternative Family Services provides foster care and adoptive services to children 0-18. We also provide mental health services to foster children and their families, and services to emancipating and former foster children in several Bay Area counties.
Description:
Alternative Family Services (AFS) provides short-term emergency shelter, long-term foster care, intensive treatment foster care, Multidimensional Treatment foster care, and foster care for developmentally disabled children and youth throughout the Bay Area. We currently have about 300 children and youth in care. AFS is a fully licensed adoption agency assisting foster parents to adopt their foster children. AFS operates Independent Living Skills training program for emancipating foster youth in Solano County. AFS offers all of its services in both the English and Spanish languages.
History:
AFS was begun in 1973 under the auspices of Huckleberry House in San Francisco to provide foster homes to teenage runaways. It “spun off” into an independent entity in 1978. It gradually changed its age of admissions so that bye the mid 1980s it was providing treatment foster care to the full age range of children 0-18. A similar program for Solano County youth was added in 2007. In 1988 it began offering Independent Living Skills training to emancipating foster youth in Marin County. AFS added foster care services for developmentally disabled children and youth in 1991. Beginning in 1995 AFS made a commitment to bi-lingualism offering all services in Spanish as well as English. AFS added adoptions to its service array in 1997. Beginning in 2004 AFS began offering Medi-Cal funded outpatient mental health services to foster children and their families in Alameda. Similar services have been added in Contra Costa and San Francisco Counties. In San Francisco, AFS’ most recent project involves offering family therapy and skills to families who have recently had a child go into foster care, with the object of helping to speed the child’s re-entry back into the family.
AFS currently has offices in San Francisco, Oakland, San Rafael, Santa Rosa and Vallejo.
Contact person: Jay Berlin, Executive Director, (phone), (email)
Office fax number: (707) 576-9700
Address:
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1421 Guerneville Road, #218Santa Rosa, CA 95403(See a map) |
Web Site: None specified
| Last updated on December 30, 2008 |
