Rosedale Shelter provides an array of services including traditional court-ordered placement, mobile outreach for diversion, a sliding fee scale for private placements to stabilize familial crisis, crisis stabilization, and telephonic crisis intervention. The Asset funds utilized for telephonic crisis intervention are from the City of Ames and support the staff time required to provide interventions over the phone to families in crisis or experiencing familial conflict. 

Rosedale has maintained a 24/7 crisis helpline throughout the long history of providing shelter services. Other funding sources currently support calls for Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Juvenile Court Services (JCS) system-involved youth. However, these funds do not support calls from parents whose children are not involved with HHS/JCS. This funding focuses on providing services to the City of Ames families/youth with the intent to resolve youth/familial conflict and connects the family with additional in-home services, counseling, and other community supports, with the goal of family reunification and to divert the families from becoming involved with HHS/JCS systems. 

City of Ames families utilize our 24/7 telephone helpline to receive crisis intervention, support, mediation, and/or additional information regarding other community support services. While Rosedale Shelter is available to serve families with youth ages 12 through 17 for placement services, the 24/7 helpline is available to respond to City of Ames families to receive the crisis intervention, de-escalation, and support they need to divert their child/youth from shelter placement. Since the Rosedale Shelter Helpline is available 24/7, no callers are turned away for these crisis telephonic services. 

As stated previously, the City of Ames families utilize our 24/7 telephone helpline to receive crisis intervention, support, mediation, and/or information regarding other community support services. While there are occasions when these calls result in shelter placement, many times staff are able to divert these local youth from shelter placement by utilizing an array of diversion services (i.e. crisis intervention, mediation, additional referrals, and community/family supports). The larger Iowa Child Welfare System continues to focus on decreasing out-of-home placement and increasing wrap-around support services to maintain children within their homes. With this shared focus, Rosedale Shelter staff continues to focus on the diversion of youth from shelter placements (or provide short-term shelter placements when there are safety concerns) by intervening on the front end of the crisis through our helpline with the intent to resolve the conflict and maintain youth in their home, whenever possible.  

Rosedale Shelter historically had additional staff on shift to assist in managing the large call volume that comes with having a crisis hotline. With staff shortages, Rosedale Shelter had to switch to providing two cell phones for direct care staff to carry with them at all times to take calls providing direct care. This has been an adjustment for a lot of staff, but has assisted Rosedale Shelter in having a quicker response time even with less staff on shift.