Unitas--building healing communities for children

Unitas is an outreach therapeutic program serving Hispanic and African American children in the South Bronx. To achieve what Unitas calls the healing of the child's "brokenness," the program has created a network of symbolic families composed of children and teenagers living in the same neighborhoods. The teenagers play the roles of symbolic and surrogate parents and become the caretakers and, indeed, therapists of the younger children. Dr. Edward Eismann, founder and director of Unitas, provides the reader with a rich, firsthand account of how he went about mobilizing the youth who would later become the core of his successful program. He also offers some of the ideas in the social sciences and therapeutic literature which influenced the shaping of Unitas. A series of training modules is included for persons interested in replicating this type of social program.