Youth Services

Youth
services

Alternative Peer Group (APG)

Many young people struggle to maintain recovery while navigating the stressors of adolescence and emerging adulthood. Alternative Peer Groups (APG) are community-based, family-centered, and professionally staffed positive peer support programs that offer prosocial fun substance-free activities. APGs create a community of young people that encourages healthy lifestyle changes in a safe, socially-reinforcing environment that is recovery and wellness-focused.

NH organizations providing Alternative Peer Groups under Creating Connections NH commit to hiring young adults with lived experience in recovery to facilitate their APG at least weekly, and partner with the Children's System of Care Resource Center to provide training aligned with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's (SAMSHA) peer recovery competencies, engage in monthly APG Learning Communities to connect and share resources to grow youth recovery supports, and provide the highest quality supports to youth and families impacted by substance use.

View the Archways APG Program Flyer

7 Challenges Program

Most young people do not seek drug treatment of their own free will. Most are dragged to counseling by their collars. By any definition, they are in the early stages of change. The Seven Challenges program starts where youth "are at" (usually resistant and reluctant to change), not where adults wish they might be or where young people often pretend to be -- ready, willing, and prepared to succeed with immediate abstinence.
Although the program strategy includes capturing any sincere impulse to quit, counselors avert power struggles and insincere commitments to change by striving for honesty and engagement instead of charging ahead with the "mad rush for abstinence." We avoid the pitfall of teaching people to be drug free before they have honestly decided to be drug free.
To succeed in working with youth, The Seven Challenges Program places a special emphasis on creating a climate of mutual respect within which individuals can talk openly and honestly about themselves. We engage young people in actively thinking about their use of alcohol or other drugs, and its effect upon their lives.
Working through The Seven Challenges helps them understand what needs they are meeting by using drugs, what harm they are causing, what risks they are taking, and what it entails to make changes. We raise consciousness, inspire hope, and motivate informed, internally driven, sincere decisions to change. Once such decisions are made, we teach the tools and provide the support that ensures success.