Charles Hall Youth Services (CHYS), a residential foster-care provider in Bismarck, North Dakota, desired to move from an adult-centered, punitive program model to a strength-based model with an emphasis on teaching critical life skills and behaviors to young clients. Through a partnership with the Teel Institute of Kansas City, Missouri, the primary focus was on developing the capacity of staff to help youth take responsibility for correcting their own behavior. Over the past two decades, the Teel Institute in Kansas City has developed and tested a classroom-based, age-appropriate spiral curriculum in Grades K-12 designed to develop social, moral, and emotional competencies in youth and to prevent problems such as underachievement, substance abuse, bullying, hopelessness, and depression. This article describes how the Teel Institute and CHYS designed and initiated an ongoing effort in order to change the way that youth workers interact with youth in residential foster care. The Teel Institute provided consultation, training, program components, and evaluation for two years of formal implementation of the project, while CHYS staff did the ultimate hard work of changing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. The success of the program was evaluated using pre-post assessment criteria of staff and students that looked at: (1) changes in the staff self-evaluations of the Program Configuration Checklist; (2) changes in youth behavior as rated by staff; and (3) changes in self-esteem based upon a self-assessment of their social, moral, and emotional competence.