We offer clients a broad range of holistic, innovative and cost-effective services. These community-based services (unlike institutionally-based) allow for greater flexibility and comfort in getting those in need the help they deserve. Just see for yourself!

Our team of experienced mental health workers hit the streets to seek out the "hidden homeless" of our city. Ignored by traditional service providers because of their complex needs, we step up...building a lasting relationship and guiding them to a better life. Services include triage and referral, temporary housing, short-term therapy, and interim case management services.

Our inter-disciplinary "ROADS" team of professionals treat those who suffer from the devestating combination of severe mental illness and co-occurring substance abuse disorders. ACT teams are staffed with specialists from multiple fields, including psychiatry, nursing, occupational therapy, employment and social work. Treatment plans are holistic and designed to address each of the client's unique recovery needs. Tailored to the individual, ACT has created astonishing levels of success.

More Information About ACT: National Alliance on Mental Illness

This unique program is designed to provide comprehensive services to people with HIV or AIDS who also suffer from substance abuse and mental health disorders. Services include home and community care, psycotherapy, substance abuse counseling, physician consultations, practical psychosocial assistance and wellness interventions. CA is proud to be one of eight national sites given the opportunity to prove just how effective this approach is.

Our MST team assists families that have been referred to us by the city's juvenile court. We use this intensive family therapy model to give parents the skills needed to address issues at home and to give the youth the ability to handle peer, school, and family pressures. This proven method brings families closer and keeps our youth out of the courts.

More Information about MST: MST Services

Tied to our MST department, this program uses a nationally-recognized strategy for assisting parents with their pre-school aged children. By participating in their development and managing their behavior, we help increase school readiness and social skills in children so that they may get off to the right start.

More information about the Incredible Years Program: Incredible Years

Imagine enduring months or years of beatings, electric shock, malnutrition and sleep deprivation in a concentration camp. Imagine being robbed, assaulted or separated from your family by those wearing the uniform of your own country. Imagine being jailed for disagreeing with your government. Imagine the injuries inflicted by government-sanctioned torturers being so extensive that you are left permanently disabled. Imagine your loved ones being killed as you watch.

Imagine fleeing to a land where you have no acquaintances, no connections, no experience, no money, no knowledge of the language or customs, no leads for housing or employment, and temporary legal status if any at all... because even this, even having close to nothing, is better than what you are fleeing.

Imagine living in this new land with emotional scars running so deep that, even if you knew where to go for help, the very act of asking is too frightening to contemplate.

For hundreds of people in St. Louis, this is daily reality.

Thousands have already come to the St. Louis area from across the globe - Somalia, Bosnia, Liberia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Togo, Ivory Coast - seeking a safe haven from unbearable physical and psychological torture inflicted upon them by the governments of their home nations. Thousands more will follow them as civil wars rage in their homelands. The trauma of torture alone creates myriad challenges for these survivors, and the daunting task of adjusting to a foreign land in what for many is an unfriendly political climate only multiplies those challenges.

Survivors of physical torture often do bear visible scars, but most of the damage left by government-sanctioned violation of human rights cannot be seen. The spectre of torture impacts the survivor's ability to work, to sleep and to maintain positive relationships. Every aspect of his or her life is threatened, and what to most of us are ordinary experiences are powerful triggers for the survivor of torture. A waiting room can be a reminder of waiting for an interrogation. A light used by a doctor during an eye examination can be a reminder of sensory torture.

The invisible scars manifest themselves in many forms: fear of being touched; aches and pains with no physical explanation; substance abuse problems; symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression or other psychiatric conditions. And those problems and scars can go under-treated or untreated because of survivors' ongoing fears of the police and other authorities. Torture survivors, those injured by their governments' representatives, are understandably unaccustomed to the idea that the government's representatives can be helpful; those without legal status have the additional threat of deportation blended with the fears that followed them from their native lands.

Survivors of torture need case management services for a wide array of issues: health care, psychiatric and mental health services, transportation, housing, legal services, language and interpretation services and employment. And it is for this great need that Community Alternatives' Survivor's Project exists.

Rule one for the caseworkers of the Survivor's Project is "don't stay in the office." Transportation is a barrier between many survivors and the help they need, so Community Alternatives brings the help home. Caseworkers can regularly be found on home visits with clients for everything from crisis interventions to assistance with everyday tasks like reading the mail. When language builds another barrier, Survivor's Project caseworkers call on interpreters from the Language Access Metro Project (LAMP) or use the multi-lingual skills several of them possess.

Caseworkers can be spotted at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in downtown St. Louis or elsewhere providing interpretation and guidance, gathering information and advocating for their refugee and asylum-seeking clients. Even the process of fingerprinting at USCIS can be difficult for these new St. Louisans - especially those who cannot speak or read English - and fingerprinting, by many accounts, is the simple part of the path to citizenship or other legal status.

The Survivor's Project team can be seen where refugees gather in the community, in places like Isaiah 58 Ministries - where as many as 80% of the African refugees who come to the African Refugee and Immigrant Service for help are survivors of torture. Places such as Isaiah 58, known by the refugee community through word of mouth, are vital contact points for finding survivors who may otherwise go unfound.

In short, the caseworkers of the Survivor's Project are outreach specialists... reaching out to those who may be hesitant or unable to reach first. For those who have escaped the danger but not the memories, Community Alternatives strives to smooth the rough road and light the darkness along the way.