Careers

Join The La Cheim Team

Short Term Residential Treatment Program

Working at La Cheim STRTP offers a unique and rewarding opportunity to positively impact the lives of male and male-identifying adolescents navigating a crucial phase of their journey. As a valued member of our dedicated team, you will play a pivotal role in providing these young individuals with the support, guidance, and care they need to overcome challenges and embark on a path towards personal growth and success. Our commitment to trauma-informed care and evidence-based interventions ensures that you will be part of a collaborative and nurturing environment, fostering not only the well-being of the residents but also your own professional development.

 

Joining La Cheim STRTP means becoming a beacon of hope for these adolescents, helping them build resilience, develop essential life skills, and discover their strengths. Your daily interactions will inspire trust and positive change, contributing to a transformative experience that has a lasting impact on both their lives and your own sense of purpose. By becoming a member of our team, you will be embarking on a journey that embraces compassion, growth, and empowerment, making a difference that extends far beyond the walls of our program.

La Cheim School

La Cheim School has oversight of La Cheim’s education program. La Cheim currently has one nonpublic school serving middle and high school students in El Sobrante California. The school utilizes a creative, positive, youth-centered, and developmentally-appropriate academic model with the intent of improving the self-esteem, mental health, resource access, academic performance, and healthy relationships of youth, thus, interrupting intergenerational patterns of violence, justice involvement, and mental health illness.
The program attends to not only the academic needs of youth but also supports youth and families to access other critical social determinants of health needs (i.e., hot meals, transportation). With small class sizes, the program provides a project-based experiential learning program, with integrated services rendered by a multidisciplinary team including a nurse, psychiatrist, mental health therapist, and mental health resource specialists. The integrated mental health and academic model provides youth with access to critical mental health services and behavioral modification services required to support learning. The model supports youth to develop their capacity to emotionally regulate, focus their attention and complete tasks, heal from trauma, acquire credits required to graduate, develop job skills, and strengthen their cognitive abilities.

 

The community at La Cheim School begins with the staff. The multidisciplinary team works closely together to provide the best support for not only our students but for each other. The work requires a lot from each of us. We understand that we are best when we work as a strong team, communicating, strategizing, learning, and laughing together. The longevity of our staff is a measurement of our dedication not only to our youth but to the team we do the work with. Our staff feel the deep satisfaction of working hard and seeing youth change and celebrating those changes as a team.

Youth Empowerment and Wellness – TBS, CBP

La Cheim’s Youth Empowerment and Wellness (YEW) Department provides intensive, structured mental health services to youth in our community. Our two programs, Therapeutic Behavioral Services (TBS) and Community Based Program (CBP), are specialized mental health programs for children and adolescents. They provide opportunities for our staff to gain experience in working with clients and their families. TBS, an intensive service focusing on helping clients manage maladaptive behaviors, works with clients within Contra Costa and Alameda counties. Our CBP program provides individual counseling to clients within the school setting in our partner schools in Oakland and San Francisco.

 

We provide ongoing training opportunities. Our Program Coordinators provide individualized training to our staff on clinical documentation practices, including Progress Note Writing and Treatment Plan development. Modality trainings are provided year-round to ensure our staff are able to confidently use interventions in line with evidence-based practices, such as CBT, Trauma Informed Care, Solution Focused Treatment, and more. Additional trainings are provided throughout the month and focus on topics relevant to our clients, such as training in Zones of Regulation, goal setting strategies, and integrating caregivers into treatment.  We adapt our training curriculum to the needs of our staff and their clients. This requires us to continually develop and adapt trainings so that each of our TBS Specialists and CBP providers gain a sense of confidence and competence in the work they do both during and outside of direct client work. Additionally, our team works closely with our affiliated school partners to provide valuable practicum opportunities to our Trainee staff, gaining the experience necessary to complete Master’s Degrees in Clinical Psychology as well as in Social Work.

Whether our staff are new to the field of mental health or working with children, or have years of experience, our programs provide a supportive environment to promote growth and skill development. The YEW Department prides itself on the dedication and care we place in the training and development of our staff. This is not only apparent in the work our TBS Specialists and CBP providers do directly with their clients, but also in the development of essential clinical skills such as documentation, collaboration within a treatment team, and developing sound, evidence-based interventions tailored to the needs and strengths of the individual client. Our TBS Specialists and CBP providers learn to engage clients and families in fun, creative, and meaningful activities, making treatment more effective and sustainable.

BHS Department

La Cheim Behavioral Health Services (BHS) is a nonprofit Community Mental Health Center providing extensive day treatment services for adults, as well as limited services for school-aged youth.

La Cheim BHS is known for being passionate about our commitment to engage with our local communities so that we may provide exceptionally inclusive, equitable, responsive, and clinically effective care to those experiencing mental health challenges. We take a relaxed, friendly, respectful, and non-institutional approach to our work with clients. We are highly theoretically eclectic, believing that a mix of therapeutic modalities and perspectives helps us meet our diverse client population where they are — focusing on interventions that serve their own goals, learning styles, and more. We are strengths-based and respect the client’s experience of their own lives. We encourage our staff to share their own clinical expertise and wisdom, via a wide and flexible range of approaches that includes CBT, DBT, IFS, Seeking Safety, attachment theory, and more.

Working within the La Cheim BHS team is serious business — we are treating life-threatening SMI, after all, including people who are so bereft of hope that they are considering ending their own lives. And yet, we also foster a warm and collaborative culture where humor, creativity, and playfulness are not only welcomed but encouraged. Together, we aspire to be an oasis of hope for those in need — an empowering and validating haven for people in our community who are weighed down by struggle, sorrow, marginalization, and despair.

Get Involved

Advocate. Volunteer. Donate