Safehaus Children’s Intensive Crisis Residential is a virtual mentoring app that is powered by thirty2give’s smartphone app software. The application uses a smartphone to facilitate positive and supportive discussions between youth and counseling professionals. The innovative tool is the result of the partnership between thirty2give, LLC and Safehaus. The express intent of the partnership is to create a safe and healthy environment that promotes positive and progressive growth opportunities through positive communication channels. Using smartphones, the relationships are structured and nurtured in guarded discussions that are fully vetted and monitored by professional counselors that are employed by Safehaus Children’s Intensive Crisis Residential. The virtual discussions are designed to complement and not replace face to face meetings that occur between youth and assigned counselors.
The typical youth that will benefit from the Safehaus mobile mentoring app is seeking a safe environment to talk not just with their counselor, but also other peers that may be experiencing similar life challenges. The Safehaus Children’s Crisis Intensive mobile app solves this problem by giving the youth participants anonymous user names that encourages open discussions in thirty2give’s “Mentoring Tree” discussion format. Under the guidance of a counselor, the Mentoring Tree supports small groups of youth that are led in discussions on topics they share in common using their smartphone as the meeting venue. All Safehaus youth users are identified only by non-personal user names while the adult counselor’s participants are identified using real names. Anonymity allows the youth participants to focus on healing under the guidance and protective oversight of the professional counselors.
To ensure their safety, youth are pre-assigned to Safehaus counselors prior to downloading the mobile app tool and can only engage in discussions with their pre-assigned counselors and the other members of the counselor’s mentoring tree.