Watch Toni Heineman’s Purpose Prize video

Working with foster children in her private practice in San Francisco, longtime clinical psychologist Toni Heineman saw the same situation over and over: a foster child in desperate need of psychological counseling, yet entirely reluctant to trust any adult.

Heineman had treated kids shuffled from one home to another, struggling to stay afloat. She knew the bleak future that many foster youth would face as they aged out of the system at age 18: Half would face unemployment, a third would be on welfare, and a third would be homeless.

One day in 1994 Heineman called 13 colleagues and suggested each offer free services to a foster child for as long as the child wanted or needed help. She realized that consistent contact between a child and therapist was the key to that child’s future – the ticket to resiliency. “One of the things we’ve learned is that foster children aren’t even aware that they’re present in someone’s mind,” Heineman explains.

The model flourished, and by 2001 Heineman, then 53, scaled back her private practice and formalized her system as a nonprofit organization called A Home Within. With the help of more than 400 volunteers, the organization now provides ongoing treatment to the 200 children currently in the program. Three hundred others who have passed through A Home Within are welcome back anytime to resume treatment with their therapists.

“Most people have little grasp of what it means to grow up in a world where no single person is fully responsible for your care or your future,” Heineman says. “I see my role as taking the message to a wider audience.”

That audience is growing, as A Home Within is expanding, adding 10 new chapters throughout the country this year for a total of 30 nationwide.

Heineman aims to train 120 therapists to be clinical directors for new A Home Within chapters, reaching beyond cities into suburbs with relatively few therapists. Several recent hires have been encore careerists themselves. Heineman wants to boost the numbers of children served as well; she’s shooting for 2,500 active cases by 2013.