OMNI’s Counseling Programming

… offers family, group and individual counseling for youth encountering emotional and behavioral difficulties. OMNI believes the best way to make positive change in adolescents is by encouraging them to learn through their actions. OMNI offers hands-on challenges with a treatment approach know as “experiential therapy”, which connects learning experience with the development of skills for life.

• Crisis Intervention Services: Professional staff is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for crisis intervention responses to adolescent related emergency situations. OMNI provides immediate response to crisis calls from police, schools, clients or families seeking immediate assistance with adolescent or family related problems. Family stabilization is the focus of this service.
• Critical Incidence Services: OMNI provides professional staff for consultation and response to communities with community wide crisis situations that have substantially impacted the community.
• Diagnostic and Assessment Services: OMNI licensed professional staff offer a comprehensive assessment and provide clinical diagnosis and individualized treatment planning for the youth and their family.
• OMNI offers a multitude of groups including:

> RESPONSE: Alternative to Suspension program. This highly utilized program has been used by schools to reduce students out of school suspension time and/or reduce the amount of time an athlete misses during their sports season.  RESPONSE is also utilized by peer juries and branch courts to limit the legal consequences a youth/teen may incur.  This early intervention program consists of three multi-family group sessions.  The focus is on accountability, decision -making and drug and alcohol resistance skills.  Parent participation allows clinicians to fully assess the youth’s areas of strength as well as any identified needs to see how OMNI Youth Services could be of additional assistance to the youth or family.  The three session program can also individualized to family and individual sessions in order to best meet the youth and family’s need.   Primary reasons for referral are for school or athletic code violations such as tobacco, alcohol or drug use, in addition to theft, bullying, or vandalism.

> Girls After-school Program (GAP):  This program serves girls 14-18 years old and not only provides a safe haven during after-school hours but also teaches the girls life skills such as perseverance, hard work, leadership, and being a successful team player.  Another goal is to promote positive self-image for these young women in addition to learning various career development skills.

> Multi-Family Emotion Management Group:  Anger can be a signal that something in our life needs to change.  One out of five Americans has an emotion management problem.  The problem is not anger, a natural human emotion, but rather the mismanagement of anger.  Emotion Management is designed to help male adolescents and their families eliminate aggression and suppression. Behaviors and emotions are often thought of being out of a person’s control.   Participants will learn how they choose to view a situation and control their emotional response.  Program goals include being able to:

1. Understand that anger involves a continuum of complex emotions.
2. Recognize and resolve the source(s) of chronic anger.
3. Acknowledge the benefits of emotional maturity and overcoming immature anger.
4. Master alternative techniques to escape suppression and aggression.

Participants who are interested in changing how they manage their emotions will learn how to make more constructive choices by recognizing, evaluating, and learning from times when they have dealt poorly with their anger.  Group contents include:

1. Anger Scale
   Define and evaluate your own anger.
2. Anger Journal
   Recognize your own anger.
3. Feeling Expression
   Realize that anger is a secondary emotion.
4. Effective Communication
   Send and receive messages that avoid excessive anger.
5. Assertive Confrontation
   Redirect suppression and aggression into assertion.
6. Reflection
   Reflect on past, present, and future impressions.
7. Conflict Resolution
   Identify options for any situation.
8. Relaxation
   Regulate emotions through belief identification.
9. Visualization
   Keep perspective of the larger picture.
10. Integration
    Move from being self-involved to empathy and forgiveness.

• School Based Groups: In response to community needs, OMNI offers programs in cooperation with school personnel in the school setting. Past programs have addressed both prevention and intervention of topics such as bullying, gang involvement, suicide, substance use/abuse, parenting adolescents, social skills, and transition to high school.  Consultation and program development can be provided for individual school issues or needs.

For more information, please contact Mary Beth Kerf, Clinical Manager at (847) 353-1660 or mkerf@omniyouth.org.

Fees for services vary from program to program.   A sliding fee scale is available for those families who may have an inability to pay, which is based upon household income, number of dependents and relevant outstanding expenses. OMNI Youth Services understands that some families are not able to pay the full hourly rate, therefore a portion of the cost may be supported by various local, state, federal and private sources. A full breakdown of the resources can be viewed in our Annual Report.

For more information on services, schedules and fees, please contact our Buffalo Grove office at (847)353-1500.