O’Connell Children’s Shelter is proud to offer a variety of services to support Kansas youth who are in need of assistance. We offer Residential Services including YRC 2 and Emergency Shelter Placements, and Qualified Residential Treatment Services. We have a licensed capacity to serve almost 60 children in residential care in five facilities located throughout Douglas County. While we support the idea that children should be raised in a family setting when safe to do so, we also understand the unique challenges some youth present and are well versed in caring for youth with severe behavior challenges, or extreme mental health needs.

Additionally, we offer prevention services; including truancy prevention programming, specialized case management, and intensive in-home services to help strengthen families and youth. We aim to be a premier program in our county and state at helping families remain safely together.

Finally, we offer services to families who want to foster or adopt. To this end, we can work with kinship families or foster families, and help support you in getting the needed licensure or home studies and background checks completed. This support then continues once placement has been made. We think you’ll find our individualized attention and experienced staff refreshing and able to meet the unique needs foster, kin and adoptive families have. We know foster families and kinship families are a critical link to caring for youth in the foster care system and our aim is to help you be successful so the youth are successful.

Collectively, our staff have 350 years in serving and supporting families. We are guided by a team of professionals in our community that make up our Board of Directors and have a vast network of committed volunteers, donors and others who support us.