Our Programs

"Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty."
Mother Theresa

Our signature program, the Healthy Child, Safe Child Program, encompasses the LBH's vast efforts to help neglected and abused children achieve healthy, age-appropriate developmental levels, using all of our social work and legal resources to advocate for safe placement in permanent homes. We do this to prevent our children from falling through the cracks in an overburdened social services system. Kids

Our Healthy Child component involves a residential child development program to repair the damage children suffer when they are neglected or abused. Accurate medical and nutritional evaluations are part of The Little Blue House intake procedures for all children. We consult with a prominent local child psychiatrist for developmental evaluations of children over age 2, because older children have many different issues, including developmental delays and emotional problems caused by years of abuse or neglect. The more quickly therapeutic interventions are implemented, the greater the benefit to the child. We provide all of these evaluations, and often the therapy itself, at our own expense.

Kids Our Safe Child advocacy efforts combine the expertise of our social work staff with our attorneys to push for a safe, permanent home for these children. We work with government social workers and lawyers, and guardians ad litem toward positive case resolutions for our children. Our staff can supervise family visits in the House, or simply observe via closed-circuit cameras located in the family visiting area. Our documented family visit reports often become part of the official court record, providing judges with additional, objective information about the child's relationship with the adoptive/foster/biological family member seeking custody.

Older children benefit from our newly implemented External Activities Program, where they take supervised trips to the zoo, parks and playgrounds, fairs and amusement parks, and swimming pools. This program is a wonderful example of how The Little Blue House offers age-appropriate stimulation to improve a child's development, while exposing them to parts of the world they might not otherwise see.

No other agency caring for children in the District of Columbia goes so far to serve the needs of its children. The Little Blue House is truly a model program, whose policies and procedures are often imitated by other agencies, but whose comprehensiveness and commitment is unmatched.