About our program

The CHARLEE Program has an extensive history of providing for abused and neglected children within Dade County. CHARLEE, which stands for Children Have All Rights: Legal, Educational, Emotional, was originally an affiliate of the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas and still remains loosely connected to the nationwide network of Menninger group care homes. The homes provide a healthy and normalizing family environment to emotionally disturbed children who have significant histories of abuse. In Dade County, CHARLEE was established in 1983 through the coordinated efforts of the Junior League of Miami, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the Episcopal Diocese of Southeast Florida.

CHARLEE presently operates five Family Care Group Homes and an Independent Living Program that currently serves thirty-six children of both sexes and all races and ethnic backgrounds. Our homes, which are located in middle-class neighborhoods, have caring live-in parents who, with the support of our professional staff, provide a community-based treatment milieu for children who have experienced multiple foster and institutional placements.

The Gladstone Center for Girls, which opened in March of 1994, serves severely abused girls between the ages of three and eighteen at the point of entry into the child welfare system. Quality residential care, evaluation, and treatment services are provided on a short term basis to eighteen children (125-150 per year) who have been emotionally and physically traumatized. Complete medical, psychological, and educational evaluations are submitted to treatment personnel in order to make appropriate decisions for children in coping with the problems that have beset them. In addition to the sixty children we serve in residence at any given time, we provide intensive treatment and case management to more than an additional 100 children reunified with their natural families, relatives and DCF foster homes.

The Supported Foster Care Program is the latest program in the CHARLEE continuum of care. The goal of the Supported Foster Care Program is to recruit, train, support, and empower potential Foster Parents who will in turn become parents to troubled children entering Foster Care. All homes are located in the Miami area and reflect the diversity of Dade County. The children who will be accepted into the SFCP will be children who had been adjudicated with intensive therapeutic support. The majority of this support will be provided by a SFCP Case Manager and Therapist. Additional support will be offered by the CHARLEE administrative and support staff, and the CHARLEE consulting psychiatrist and psychologist.

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