Shannon Hemstreet and her husband
Mark are proud to support the mission of Missoula Youth Homes. In 1971, the
Montana Board of Crime Control offered the 4th Judicial District Court a grant
to establish one of the first community-based group homes in Montana. Empowered
by the chief probation officer at the time, a group of local community members
worked to incorporate the home, and in February 1972, the group opened the
District Youth Guidance Home.
Over the late 1970s and 1980s,
the organization opened three more homes to meet the needs of the community. An
“attention home” served the crisis needs of adolescent offenders and runaways,
while the other homes provided intensive services for youth. The homes shifted
from live-in house parents to rotating staff 24-hour supervision, and changed
the organization's legal name to Missoula Youth Homes. A foster care program to
provide youngsters with family placements when appropriate was also added.
During the 1990s, the foster care
program grew to twenty placements, with more than half of those vulnerable
children under the age of 11. This demonstrated that there was a need for a
group home geared toward younger children who required more care than a foster
family could provide, so the Sherry Mahon Francetich Children’s Home was
established in 1994. In 1995, we established an emergency shelter in Kalispell,
which was the first home established outside Missoula County. We also added a
boys’ treatment home and a second Francetich children’s treatment home.
In 2002, the Bitterroot Attention
Home (now the Linda Massa Youth Home) opened in Hamilton, and in 2005, the
InnerRoads Wilderness Treatment Program was acquired by the organization. In
2012, Missoula Youth Homes merged with Friends to Youth to offer family-based
counseling as part of the Dan Fox Family Care Program.
