"We focus on the relationship as an intervention. It’s the container in which healing, identity, and belonging are restored."
Candice Simonds, LCSW, LISW-S, BCD, spent more than a decade developing, managing, and directing intensive community-based programs serving youth involved with child welfare, juvenile justice, and county mental health systems. Her clinical experience spans work in large health care systems as a medical social worker as well as end-of-life care, supporting individuals and families through complex medical and psychosocial transitions. She holds a master’s degree in sociology from Western Michigan University and a Master of Social Work from the University of Southern California.
Candice currently serves as chief program officer at A Home Within, where she oversees strategic initiatives to advance the organization’s mission. She also maintains a private practice focused on compassionately exploring new possibilities and modalities to address psychosocial stress related to multiethnic cultural identity.
A Home Within is a national nonprofit dedicated to providing free, long-term mental health care to current and former foster youth. Founded in 1994 by psychologist Dr. Toni Heineman, the organization was built on a simple but powerful belief: healing happens through consistent, trusted relationships. A Home Within connects foster youth with volunteer licensed therapists who commit to staying with them for as long as needed, without time limits or insurance barriers.
Through a growing network of chapters across the country, A Home Within not only delivers direct therapeutic care but also works to advance trauma-responsive practices in the mental health field. By centering relationships, continuity, and dignity, the organization addresses the deep emotional impacts of foster care and helps young people build stability, resilience, and a sense of belonging.
Q: Can you share a bit about what drew you to the field of mental health and A Home Within?
Candice Simonds (CS): I became a social worker because I was captivated by what happens when you sit with someone and truly listen to their experience. Early on, I spent time with a friend connected to A Home Within (AHW), and I found myself drawn to the organization’s ethos. I was moved by its commitment to care outside of the traditional, mainstream system. It was an amazing place to observe treatment that centered humanity, curiosity, and relationship rather than pathology alone.
Q: How does your approach differ from traditional mental health models? What principles guide your work?
CS: My approach has always come back to the power of sitting with someone and genuinely listening. Clinical training teaches us how to diagnose, but symptoms are human, not just clinical; they’re expressions of distress, not definitions of identity. Too often, mental health education can be disempowering. Individuals internalize the idea that something about them needs to be fixed when really it’s their inner world that needs to be nurtured and seen.
I’ve always been drawn to outliers, to the question of why someone breaks a pattern, or how resilience emerges. I approach the work through humility: the belief that I can learn something from every client. Knowledge lives in the community, not just in the clinician. My responsibility is to show up in service, center agency and power, and allow all parts of myself to holistically meet someone where they are.
Q: This can be tough work—what sustains you?
CS: Witnessing resilience sustains me. Simply bearing witness to someone’s experience has always been enough for me—and many clients experience being truly seen as healing. I don’t believe in “saving” people; I believe in nurturing possibilities with them.
I also tend to my own nervous system. My heart doesn’t “break,” even in grief; it expands. Through the winding road of this journey of dwelling in humanity’s hardest places, I have learned that the center of the universe’s protective armor is love. I want every client to feel loved—that is truly at the core of how I show up in the therapy room each and every day.
Q: For those unfamiliar, what is A Home Within and what makes its model unique?
CS: A Home Within removes one of the biggest barriers to mental health care for foster youth: the financial system. Therapy is free for everyone. That creates the foundation for real, consistent, relationship-based healing, especially for people who have experienced profound separation and loss.
Our model gives providers the time and space to nurture the therapeutic relationship without billing pressures or productivity requirements. Every practitioner is a volunteer and is committed to showing up for their clients for as long as it takes, with many relationships spanning years and even decades. The work is rooted in the commitment that each and every practitioner welcomes clients into a community of deep, loving care. That ethos—inviting people in and holding them with excellence—is at the heart of A Home Within.
Q: How does A Home Within meet the specific needs of foster youth in ways traditional systems often don’t?
CS: When a child’s foundational relationships have been disrupted, the most healing thing you can offer is a stable relationship. Traditional systems often can’t provide long-term relational continuity because they’re bound by insurance, turnover, or productivity demands. We focus on the relationship as an intervention. It’s the container in which healing, identity, and belonging are restored.
Q: What challenges does your organization face today, and how are you working to overcome them?
CS: One challenge is the scale of need versus the resources to match youth with the right clinicians. We’ve grown significantly—this year, which marks our thirtieth anniversary, has seen a surge in applications. We now have a list of providers we can offer to clients, which is an incredible milestone, offering folks agency in choosing a practitioner that particularly aligns with their unique needs and identity. Even so, the complexity of foster care—its trauma, transience, and systemic gaps—requires constant innovation and community building.
Q: How do you recruit and support volunteer clinicians, and what impact does that long-term relationship have?
CS: Recruitment is largely relational—volunteers invite their friends. We also partner with professional organizations and run ads, but word of mouth is our core. We’ve also found that once in our sphere, volunteers rarely leave. The average relationship lasts about three-and-a-half years; some have lasted more than 16. That depth of commitment changes clinicians. Once they join, many feel it becomes a lifelong calling. Right now, we have around 700 clients being served and fewer than 100 volunteers waiting to be matched—which tells you how steady the clinician commitment really is.
Each week, hundreds of A Home Within volunteer therapists sit down with a client who has experienced foster care.
Q: Can you share more about the mentorship model AHW offers that supports emerging therapists from underrepresented backgrounds?
CS: Yes, our Building Practice in Community offering grew from listening to clients who sought providers with greater cultural affinity. DEI initiatives can be short-term; we wanted something long-term that was rooted in relationship. We’ve built powerful cohorts of early-career therapists across the country—primarily Black and Latinx providers—offering them resources, training, and mentorship. We train them in modalities like eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, which clients frequently request but are often inaccessible due to cost.
We’ve now welcomed our third cohort, and we’re expanding further continuing education opportunities to equip therapists with what clients most desire.The idea is to offer possibilities: tools for transition, pathways into teaching, and a culturally integrated approach to trauma work as a core philosophy. It’s about returning to our humanness—to the threads that connect us.
Q: How do you define flourishing in the context of mental well-being?
CS: Flourishing is recognizing the richness of our full human experience—our emotions, our wholeness, our internal resources. It’s the ability to listen inwardly, to widen the lens, to use all parts of ourselves.
We’ve limited the paradigm too much. We can pathologize our quirks and edges. Sometimes what looks clinical is just human. And when people are truly hurting, that’s when mental health care must be there—credible, compassionate, and clear.
Q: What do you see as the most pressing mental health issues facing foster youth today?
CS: Belonging. A deep longing to belong—to someone, to a family, to a lineage. Loss, grief, and the desire to be held with love are at the center of their suffering. Many youth carry the lineage of their parents with them. I try to create space for that lineage, for redemption, and for the truth that despite all that may have transpired in their lives, they were born lovable.
Q: How do you think systems can better integrate trauma-informed care into everyday practice?
CS: By acknowledging that we all suffer. No one is immune. Whether I’m working in hospice or with affluent clients, the truth is the same—we all die, we all grieve, and we all long to be seen. Trauma-informed care asks us to remove the layers that distance us from that truth and meet each other human to human. It doesn’t take long for people to show up vulnerably when they feel safe.
Q: What’s missing from the national conversation about youth mental health?
CS: Resilience. Humanness. We’ve created a generation that struggles to tolerate discomfort, and we’ve mislabeled basic fear responses as pathology. I have three sons and I want them to be kind and gentle, and I want them to know how to tolerate challenges, as it’s an unavoidable aspect of this human experience. When we acknowledge our wholeness—which derives from the world holy—we can show up in vulnerability, which is actually our deepest strength. We are missing whole-person care; it’s time to widen the lens and tap into the richness of our internal world.
We must remember: you don’t have to do hard things alone. The missing piece is community—showing up for each other with humility, strength, and tenderness. I’m impatient with the mental health industrial complex and its profit over people approach. We need to compassionately look again—with grace, with forgiveness—and ask what truly helps in a deep way.
Q: What is bringing you hope right now? Where are you finding joy?
CS: The fact that we’re having this conversation brings me hope. Humans learn, yearn, and fight to be loved. Scarcity around love makes us afraid, but connection restores us. Music brings me joy—I play the piano, and I’ve always played an instrument. Curiosity also brings me joy. I love outliers, not for the why but for the how.
Kind curiosity is my posture: believing people do the best they can with the resources they have. Emotional impoverishment does the most harm. Gratitude grounds me. I say my prayers. I’m joyful because I exist and breathe, and I never take that for granted.
A panel of individuals formerly in foster care shared their experiences in June of 2025 at the University of San Francisco.
This interview is part of the Nova Institute for Health’s Insight Collaborative for Mental Well-Being project. The Insight Collaborative is supported by a generous seed grant from the Mental Insight Foundation.
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