By James Hanlon
Leader Staff Writer
Crossroads for Youth has a new podcast series hosted by the organization’s clinical director, Chris Veihl.
“We’ll be having a series of conversations about things that we’re doing here,” Veihl said in a video announcing the project, “not only at Crossroads for Youth, but in our community, to enhance the lives of not only the children and adolescents that we work with here at Crossroads for Youth, but all of us.”
Crossroads for Youth is a residential treatment center for court adjudicated youth, on E. Drahner Rd. in Oxford Township. In a rural setting, the facility provides at-risk children ages 7-17 a safe environment to receive counseling, therapy, educational aid and support. Founded in 1951 as Camp Oakland, the nonprofit was renamed in 1999.
“Obviously there’s a lot of podcasts out there, but I think Crossroads for Youth is a unique agency,” Veihl said in an interview with this reporter. “Working with the high-risk youth that we work with, we have a lot of pretty extreme mental health issues and psychological concerns and trauma recovery. I just thought that sharing some of those insights, doing some interviews with people who are specialists in this field would be a nice thing for the overall community.”
Veihl is a licensed professional counselor who will share conversations with experts in emotional, mental and physical health and well-being to talk about some of the alternative therapies at Crossroads, like animal-assisted interventions and art therapy. In the 50-minute premiere episode of “Crossroads Cross-talk with Chris,” he discusses the healing power and connection between at-risk youth and at-risk dogs with Dr. Amy Johnson, director of the Center for Human Animal Interventions at Oakland University.
For over a decade, Crossroads has worked with Johnson’s nonprofit Teacher’s Pet; Dogs and Kids Learning Together, whose intervention program pairs troubled youth with hard-to-adopt shelter dogs for multi-week training workshops.
He hopes that a general audience will be able to learn from what he shares about the work happening at Crossroads and apply it to their own lives. The podcast can also be a platform to offer general guidance. If anyone has general questions about mental health or a situation they are going through, they can send those to Veihl and he can try to give some insight.
“[Podcasts are] an interesting platform in our society today,” Veihl said. “It’s a good way for people to get information. I’ll try to keep it right around 35 to 45 minutes – seems to be the average car ride listen.”
New episodes will drop about once every three weeks. The podcast is now available on PodBean and Spotify.