Casey Goes To Bat For Children Center Will Provide Support For Vulnerable Families

Neglected children in Spokane can now crawl through a new jungle gym of services - three floors of them.

The Casey Family Partners center, which aims to give cutting-edge help to vulnerable children and their families, opens officially today at 613 S. Washington.

The goal is to wrap families in the arms of a natural support network of friends, other family members and social services.

“A lot of families in serious crisis - they don’t have a lot of support,” Director Mary Ann Murphy said. “We struggle a lot with families, providing services that match cultural traditions and beliefs and tailoring them to their needs.”

The center is the latest in a string of collaborations between Sacred Heart and Deaconess medical centers. This time, the hospitals are each putting in $100,000 a year, plus support.

They stepped to the plate after the Casey Family Program, a prestigious charitable organization in Seattle, decided in January to donate $500,000 a year to help Spokane’s neglected youth.

The Deaconess Regional Center for Child Abuse and Neglect has been moved, from cramped rooms in the hospital to more than twice the space in the South Washington building.

The Casey Family Partners’ open house will be held from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. today.

The first floor houses offices. The second floor features a play area for children, including a kitchen, bookcases and couches. It looks like day care. Children will play; families will get support and training. Parents will have a separate room for counseling.

On the third floor, there’s a small lobby and play area with a basket of Lincoln logs. The counseling rooms look like family living rooms and a medical exam room cradles stuffed animals.

Center administrators want the program to knit a web of help for vulnerable children. They want to fill gaps left by traditional programs.

For instance, most people don’t turn to the police or to Child Protective Services for help when they’re in trouble. They turn to their extended families, church members and neighbors.

The Casey program will try to put everything together.

It will link families to everyone from doctors to prosecutors, drug counselors to job skill trainers. Both public and private agencies will work with families to form teams to tailor help.

“I certainly am not going to say it takes a village to raise a child,” Murphy said. “That’s become trite. But it certainly takes a lot of experts to do what’s right for children, including the families themselves.”

The program at Deaconess tried to help 350 sexually abused children and 50 neglected children a year. It saw two new families every month.

The Casey program is expanding.

It will try to reach another 300 neglected children every year. Staff will be able to see 10 new families a month in the first year, and 20 new families a month by the third year.

The goal is to stop trouble before it starts and work intensively with families on solutions. This might mean housing, food or medical care.

“The first priority is safety for the children,” Murphy said.

The experiment already has drawn national attention, earning $400,000 in grants.

Federal grants have been awarded to 12 communities, including Baltimore, Md., and Marysville, Wash., to help them start similar programs.

Eastern Washington University received a $25,000 federal grant to help develop a multi-discipline training program.

Administrators of the Casey center hope to set a new standard in treating neglect that other communities will copy.

“We’re reaching really at the edge of the state of the art,” Murphy said.

, DataTimes