When I toured Youth Home’s Tom Roy Youth Guidance Home in April 2025, it was to see the location of the organization’s one bed set aside for youth experiencing a crisis in Missoula.
Amy Schaer, the organization’s CEO, told me then that Youth Homes was planning an entire group home for youth in crisis, who would otherwise often end up in the emergency room or in juvenile detention.
After a fundraising campaign earlier this year, that eight-bed co-ed therapeutic crisis shelter in Missoula’s Orchard Homes neighborhood will open its doors next week.
“Currently, there is not a place for kids to go [who are] in crisis, who are the ages of 10 to 17,” Schaer told me Wednesday at the ribbon cutting for the Birnbaum Youth Home. “So to be able to open not just a home, but a home that feels like a home where they can just be, it feels really monumental.”
The Birnbaum Youth Home, named for Geoff Birnbaum, the organization’s longtime executive director who died last year, will provide a safe environment for children in crisis and allow them to continue their education and access other services, Schaer told the crowd gathered for the ribbon cutting. A shelter stay could last 24 hours to 90 days.
The organization previously ran a similar shelter, the Attention Home, from 1976 until 2023. It closed due to challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic, workforce shortages, the housing crisis and inflation, said Shannone Hart, a Youth Homes board member.
“Over the last three years, more than 150 young people in our community needed a safe place to go and didn’t have one,” Hart said. “So for the past two years, we’ve worked together to build something new, something better, something stronger. A place where young people can find safety, support and hope when they need it the most.”
Youth Homes expects the shelter to serve about 100 youth each year. The organization is working with other providers in the community to create a larger system of care for children in crisis, Schaer said.
“For kids finding themselves in situations that don’t have many options, if they don’t have family members here that can take care of them, there’s really no place for them to go,” she said. “The options are not good options. And so this community, I think, is a much stronger community by recognizing that need and providing this home for kids who need it.”
Youth Homes is raising the remaining $100,000 to complete the $4 million shelter project and has created wish lists of items to be donated to stock the house.
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