Georgia Industrial Children's Home is an innovative leader in providing optimum care to homeless, abused and neglected adolescents. We've left behind the institutionalized setting of dormitories and communal dining. Instead our group homes in Macon and our foster homes across the state function as independent families, just like your own.

All our residents lead normal teenager lifestyles, keeping busy with various activities. They get to cheerleading and ball practice after school and on weekends, they work after-school jobs, they are responsible for chores and homework. And each night they gather for meals around their own kitchen table, as a family.

The difference is that the adolescents we serve have increasingly complicated problems, and are relearning ways to communicate, to deal with each other, to respect themselves and others and to experience what being a family means.

On a 24-hour basis, teaching parents model respect, communication and social skills, and responsibility. Our adolescents earn points for real-life skills in the midst of experiencing a real-life family setting, sometimes for the very first time. It can be a life-changing opportunity for teenagers and adolescents who've run out of chances. The skills they learn here help them break self-destructive patterns of behavior and interrupt the cycle of abuse and violence that haunts our society.