TAG in Action: Anu Family Services

As part of its national call to action, Adolescent Health: Think, Act, Grow® (TAG), the Office of 

Adolescent Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has identified a number 

of successful strategies for improving adolescent health throughout the country.

The Goal Anu Family Services helps children and youth address their grief, loss and trauma so that they 

may develop permanent connections with loving and stable families.

The Game 

Plan 

Anu Family Services, Inc. was established in 1992 as PATH Wisconsin, Inc. PATH was an early 

founder of the treatment foster care model and was cited nationally as a prime example. In 2008, 

PATH Wisconsin became Anu Family Services. Anu uses a unique combination of trauma-informed 

approaches to address relational trauma through a lens of grief and loss, which helps youth 

restore their capacity to connect and engage in healthy relationships. Anu now operates in 

Wisconsin and Minnesota and provides a full continuum of client-driven, family-centered services 

including treatment foster care, parent coaching, intensive permanence services, and intensive 

trauma services. 

The majority of Anu’s clients are adolescents and their families. The youth have often experienced 

trauma from neglect; emotional, physical or sexual abuse; illness; parental illness; parental 

incarceration; or removal from their original parent’s home. It is not uncommon for youth to 

exhibit a wide variety of symptoms or pain-based behaviors such as opposition, lying, stealing or 

aggression. Anu staff learned that once youth understand that their pain-based behaviors are 

normal responses to grief and trauma, they could develop healthy, trusting relationships. 

Anu builds networks of support for youth by engaging in exhaustive searches to find all the 

people that a young person had loved and lost: family, schoolmates, teachers, coaches, or even a 

lunch lady. Anu’s staff has expertise in trauma-informed parenting and provides one-on-one 

parent coaches to foster, adoptive and kinship parents. Parents are trained on utilizing “Present 

Moment Parenting” and are given skills to parent youth who, due to trauma, often don’t respond 

to typical parenting methods. 

The 

Winning 

Plays 

Mechele Pitt, Anu’s Executive Director, explained that Anu staff empower youth by putting them 

in control of their future. This is critical because youth in the “system” have been given little, if 

any, control in their lives. “Our specialty is understanding what you actually need to do differently 

to help youth heal. When we saw youth continue to push away adults who loved them, we better 

prepared the adults to understand the youths’ pain-based behaviors and respond accordingly. 

When we saw how little control these youth had, we let them set the pace of their casework and 

even fire their caseworkers. When we saw that it took a unique approach for each youth to heal, 

we took time finding what interests each of them and began connecting youth with all kinds of 

healthy activities from mindfulness to art or equine therapy. We are relentless. We do whatever 

works to help youth heal, build healthy relationships and re-connect.”

Learn 

More 

Anu Family Services

https://www.anufs.org/

HHS Office of Adolescent Health | Website: http://www.hhs.gov/ash/oah/TAG Twitter: @TeenHealthGov Email: TAGTEAM@hhs.gov