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The primary goal of a Therapeutic Community is to foster personal growth. This is accomplished by changing an individual's lifestyle through a community of people working together to help themselves and each other.

People in a Therapeutic Community (TC) are members, as in any family setting, not patients, as in an institution. These members play a significant part in managing the TC and acting as positive role models for others.

The TC represents a highly structured environment with defined boundaries, both moral and ethical. It employs community imposed rules and guidelines, as well as earned advancement of status and privileges, as part of the recovery and growth process. Being part of something greater than oneself is an especially important factor in facilitating positive growth.

Members and staff act as facilitators, emphasizing personal responsibility for one's own life and for self-improvement. The members are supported by staff as well as being serviced by staff, and there is a sharing of meaningful labor so that there is a true investment in the community, sometimes for the purpose of survival.

Peer pressure is often the catalyst that converts criticism and personal insight into positive change. High expectations and high commitment from both, members and staff, support this positive change. Insight into one's problems is gained through group and individual interaction, but learning through experience, failing and succeeding and experiencing the consequences, is considered to be the best influence toward achieving lasting change.

The TC emphasizes the integration of an individual within this community, and the progress is measured within the context of the community against that community's expectations. It is this community, along with the individual, that accomplishes the process of positive change in the member. The tension created between the individual, and this community eventually resolves in the favor of the individual, and this community eventually resolves in an important measure of readiness to move toward integration into the larger society.

Authority is both horizontal and vertical, encouraging the concepts of sharing responsibility, and supporting the process of participating in decision making when this is feasible and consistent with the philosophy and objectives of the Therapeutic Community.

If you participate, then you will change.