Company Profile

Company Overview

The Organization:

Walker’s mission is to transform the lives of children and youth who are facing complex emotional, behavioral, and learning challenges by partnering with these children and youth, their families, and communities to nurture hope, build strengths, and develop lifelong skills. Walker is 501c3 nonprofit agency that is committed to building the capacity of extremely vulnerable and challenged children to live and learn in their own homes and community schools. Walker programs provide highly specialized, meaningful therapeutic learning and living environments and experiences that help children and adolescents build on their strengths to heal, learn, and grow, while partnering with their struggling families to restore hope.


Serving children and youth throughout Eastern Massachusetts, Walker offers an array of programs staffed by highly expert multidisciplinary teams that provide exceptional community and campus-based mental health and treatment services, state of the art special education (K-12) schools, a wide range of professional training and consultation services, and public policy advocacy. Walker is more than “a place.” Its multidisciplinary programs extend specialized therapeutic environments beyond our campuses into family homes, public schools and community settings.

Through the Walker Trieschman Institute for Research and Training, professionals, interns and fellows alike find rewarding professional development and training opportunities. As a center for innovation in child welfare, special education and children's mental health for over 54 years, Walker has earned national recognition as a leader in the field.

The Board of Directors, in collaboration with CEO, Susan Getman, and her team of senior leaders recently completed a three-year strategic plan which positions Walker at the leading edge of new programs, evidence-based practice, state of the art technology, and research with a refreshed, positive, clear and shared vision of the future.

Walker offers the following programs and services:

Residential & Education Programs

• The Walker School
o Located on Walker’s Needham Campus, The Walker School is a coeducational, private K-8 special education academic program, with integrated intensive clinical, occupational therapy, and speech and language services. Significant individualized support allows students to address behavioral, social, and emotional skills throughout the school day, in and out of the classroom.
• Stepping Stones
o Co-located within the Walker School, Stepping Stones provides students on the Autism Spectrum with additional mental health challenges and behavioral support to build social skills, executive functioning, and self-regulation while continuing their academic learning.

• Beacon High School
o Located on Walker’s Watertown Campus, Beacon High School is a coeducational, integrated academic and therapeutic program serving adolescents who face anxiety, depression or other emotional and psychological challenges. With a focus on enriched educational surroundings, creative and performing arts education, and self-expression, the inclusive environment is a safe-space for students of diverse racial and cultural backgrounds, sexual orientations, and gender identity and expression. Each student has individualized goals and benefits from in-the-moment
interventions designed to help students build confidence, resilience, emotional stability, and lifelong coping skills.

• Residential Treatment Program
o Located on a beautiful, sprawling suburban campus, Walker’s Residential Treatment Program is a highly specialized, nationally accredited, fully licensed, flexible, family-driven program for children between the ages of 5 and 13 with high-risk behaviors. Our therapeutic program helps children impacted by trauma and challenged by mental health conditions build the skills necessary to develop and then maintain the capacity to thrive in a family and home community.

• Ain Group Home
o Ain Group Home is an intensive, 12-bed, coeducational program that provides a safe, therapeutic, and structured, living environment for youth between the ages of 5 and 13 who participate in the community through public school attendance and extracurricular activities. Programs are specially designed to support children in returning to family or to preparing them to join a new adoptive family.


Behavioral Health & Community Programs

• Hospital Diversion Programs
o Hospital-diversion programs provide short-term emergency stabilization as a community-based alternative to psychiatric in-patient hospitalization for children who are actively experiencing severe emotional and behavioral crises. The Community-Based Acute Treatment Program (CBAT) serves children between the ages of 5 and 13. The Intensive Community-Based Acute Treatment Program (ICBAT) offers services to children as young as 3 years old.

• Walker Community Counseling
o Walker Community Counseling supports children, adolescents, and adults in making positive life changes through individual therapy, group therapy, family therapy, home-based services and psychopharmacological care. Our licensed mental health clinic includes clinical social workers, mental health counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychiatric nurse prescribers who have expertise with a broad range of behavioral health and social concerns. Located on Walker’s Needham Campus, as well as various community locations, client-centered outpatient therapists diagnose and treat behavior challenges, emotional issues, trauma and other complex behavioral health needs.

Training & Consultation

• The Walker Trieschman Institute
o The Walker Trieschman Institute for Research & Training (WTI) promotes the integration of research and training into everyday practice to improve the quality of care and treatment for children and youth facing mental health, emotional, behavioral, and learning challenges. Drawing on the work of Walker’s founder, the late Albert E. Trieschman, PhD, WTI draws upon a diverse faculty of experts and researches evidence-based practices as well as
emerging concepts and interventions that can inform the efforts of providers, family members and their communities, public policy, and institutions of higher learning.

• Walker Partnerships
o Walker Partnerships, a component of WTI, provides consulting, training, and direct care services for public and private schools, and community-based youth agencies throughout Massachusetts. Since 1994, Walker Partnerships has been providing comprehensive services to help organizations increase their capacity to include those youth with serious emotional disabilities in their programs who would otherwise be at risk of marginalization or exclusion.

• Walker Permanency Center
o Part of WTI, the Walker Permanency Center is a provider of specialty training, program and clinical consultation, and technical assistance services. Our goal is to support children, families, local practitioners, community and state agencies in their efforts to advance permanency for all children. Every child deserves a loving, lifelong, legal family as well as other adults who will support them through their growing years and beyond. Successfully supporting existing families or when needed, preparing a child to join a new, permanent family requires trauma informed, competent, evidence-based practice. To this end, the Permanency Center provides access to a continuum of capacity building services for professionals that includes, but is not limited to: The Walker Permanency Practice Model©, adoption competency training, conferences and symposia that address best practices and current issues related to permanency.


For more information on Walker, visit our website: www.walkercares.org