Grace House Children’s Project…The idea of Grace House Children’s Project has been with us for years. We always knew we wanted to help children. We just weren’t always quite sure what that looked like. Until last year. We have spent the last 14 years creating, building and running Renaissance Ranch – an adult substance abuse residential treatment center. We added Therapia Addiction Healing Center 4 years ago. However, we felt it was time to move on.
As we began to think about our transition away from Renaissance Ranch and Therapia, we started to explore the concept of Grace House Children’s Project and what that could look like. We started hearing more about children who are trafficked for sex and for slavery. We could see the refugee crisis getting worse and included a lot of children who are traumatized by war and displacement. And we knew that there was something there that we needed to do. We needed to help children heal from trauma. In our experience with addiction treatment, the root of a lot of substance abuse can be found in childhood and adult trauma. We know that if we can help heal the trauma it will make all the difference in a person’s life.

HR took a trip to Haiti in August to get on the ground and see what the situation was like. That was a pivotal moment. It really helped him to solidify the model and the concept of what we needed to do to help kids heal from trauma. His experiences in Haiti led to the idea for the international mobile trauma teams and we were able to begin to quantify what Grace House Children’s Project would be.

We are still in the early stages of developing our model and bringing it to life. But we know what it is, we know what it looks like and we know we can help children. We hope you’ll share this journey with us.