As we move into this wonderful weekend celebrating the 4th of July, let’s remember to keep our children (and pets!) safe. We need to be careful with any fireworks and make sure that children and pets aren’t in any danger. And as we celebrate, let’s think about children and freedom. Children have rights too! They have the right to be safe and to have  adults who love them and care for them. Most of all, they need to be safe…not just from fireworks, but from those that might do them harm. Let’s think about the rights that we as adults enjoy, and make sure that with these rights we carry the obligation to make sure that those that depend on us are safe. Are there children in your life? Are they safe? Do they know that they can depend on you? It’s what we all must do! Happy 4th of July!!

Atta girl, atta boy! Isn’t that what we all want to hear? Whether we are young or old, there’s nothing like someone saying “you did good”. Just think of all those times that someone praised you and told you that you were doing such a great job at something. It may have been mowing the yard, making your bed, washing the car. Whatever, we always remember when someone said that we did great.  For children these are the words that make them stretch to new heights. These moments give them the strength to achieve. For children, these are the moments when they learn that anything is possible. Today, take a minute. Praise a child. Tell them they did great!

What do most children want? A new phone, a puppy, a horse? No, most children long for the love and support of a family who thinks they are the funniest, the best, the smartest, the bravest. Parents who say…”You are the best thing that ever happened to me”.  This week, let’s all tell our children how special they are and how much we love them.  As a child….YOU are the best thing that ever happened to any of us! This week we are going to learn a way to praise a child each day. Will they get “the big head”? Nope, they will know you love them.

The best way to stop child sexual abuse is to talk about it. We avoid talking about child sexual abuse in our society, trying to tell ourselves it can’t really be true, it doesn’t happen very often, or, the most dangerous, it won’t happen to my child. And yet, one out of every 4 girls and 1 out of every 6 boys is sexually assaulted before the age of 18. (Links to statistics click D2L, NCPPC and Megan’s Law.)

This week, Oprah Winfrey, who was sexually abused herself, took on the task of talking about child sexual abuse in a most unusual way. Oprah, in consultation with their therapist, interviewed four sex offenders. The result of that conversation is some of the most dramatic and important information about child sexual abuse that you will ever see.

The link is to part 1, and if you are able to continue to watch, part 2 and 3 are equally compelling. But once you have finished watching and understand better why we think child sexual abuse is so important, we would ask you to do one more thing – Get educated about how you can make it stop!

If you go to our prevention pages and learn about the Darkness 2 Light prevention program, you will see what we mean. If you go to Stewards of Children you will learn what you can do.

And lastly, we would ask you to take the seven steps to protect children.  We list them here, but you can go here for more details.

1. Learn the facts
2. Minimize Opportunity
3. Talk about it.
4. Stay Alert
5. Make a Plan
6. Act on Suspicions
7. Get involved.

Here is the evidence that our event at Paschals was a huge success!

The Cheer for Children Ball of 2009 was a wonderful success. We will be talking about how well we did in later posts, but for now – enjoy watching all the fun and think about next year!

Our CEO Nancy Chandler was a co-presenter at the Georgia Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers Annual Conference. She and Peggy Palmiter presented on Social Media and Nonprofits. It was well attended and everyone seemed to both enjoy themselves and learn something. If you are interested in seeing the powerpoint presentation, click here.

Here is a video played at the workshop that you might find interesting…..

The next few blog posts will introduce you to our services at the Georgia Center for Child Advocacy. We begin with our Prevention Initiative, because this is a program for any adult who cares about stopping child sexual abuse! We are committed to training 1 million adults in Georgia by 2020, because we believe it is the responsibility of each of us to learn how to keep children safe. Our Prevention Initiative uses the Darkness to Light training model, and it is truly amazing the difference these adults can make in children’s lives.

Through Georgia’s Prevention Initiative, the Georgia Center for Child Advocacy aims to educate all adults who have responsibility for children and to integrate the Darkness to Light program into all organizations and institutions where children are being served. The ultimate outcome by 2020 is that all Georgia’s children are in safe environments where they are protected from sexual abuse and can enjoy healthy and happy childhoods.

Please visit our prevention pages on this site to learn more about the training, sign up, and, find out how you can become a facilitator.

Some of you know us well, but many of you are new friends we have made during our recent social networking efforts. We are facing a difficult time at the Georgia Center for Child Advocacy, and this blog post is to tell you about it. We created this document for a network news piece that was done on the center on Monday, August 3rd. The link of the video is here. We thought this post might help both our new and old friends understand where we are and how we got here.


Background: The Georgia Center for Child Advocacy was formed in September, 2007 after the merger of two existing Children’s Advocacy Centers: The Georgia Center for Children and the Fulton County Children’s Advocacy Center. We have two separate centers, one in DeKalb County and one in Fulton County providing forensic interviews to children who have alleged to have been seriously physically or sexually abused. We offer treatment services to children and their families and all of services are free to our clients. We also have a statewide child sexual abuse prevention program. We work closely with members of our multi-disciplinary team: law enforcement, DFACS, the District Attorneys offices, Children’s Health Care of Atlanta and other partners. Following the merger, I was hired as the CEO and recruited to Atlanta from my previous position as the Executive Director of National Children’s Alliance, the national membership and accrediting body of Children’s Advocacy Centers.

Shortly after my arrival in Atlanta, our Fulton office which was housed in free space at the Work Force Development building on Pollard was flooded and we had to seek new space for our Fulton program. We were able to lease our current site on Woodland and move into the space in mid-February of 2008.

Current situation: As with most Children’s Advocacy Centers around the country, we rely on funding from many different sources. Since the beginning of the recession in late 2007, we have seen a large drop off in donations from most of our sources. United Way has cut funding by 25%, the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council which oversees the Victims of Crime act funding cut 11% for this past year with another 10% cut coming in the next cycle.

Since 2007, government grants have been reduced by 33%, and individual donations have fallen 137%. Donations from employee groups are down 6% and excluding our restricted grant for prevention activities, our foundation support is down 51%. Overall, since the end of 2007, we have lost more than $300,000 in funding.

Hoping in late 2008 that the recession was coming to a close, we created a 2009 budget for $1.9 million and have now reduced that budget to a little less than $1.5 million dollars. We were able to cut $200,000 through conscientious cost savings, not filling empty staff positions etc. but when we reviewed our current budget at the end of June, we knew that another major cut would be necessary to maintain services and to keep the doors open. In July, we were forced to cut all staff salaries by 40%. The result of that is that we have lost three employees and other staff is hoping to supplement their income with part time jobs. Our staff is working hard to keep our services at the high level they have always been, but such a drastic reduction in income has created a great strain for all of them. Cash flow continues to be a critical need and we are facing a very tight end of the year.

We have reduced our hours, but are still maintaining services to children. The Fulton office is closed on Friday with hours of 10-6 and the DeKalb office is closed on Monday with hours of 9-5. Throughout all of this, our requests for services continue to grow. Overall for the first several months of this year compared to the same time period last year, our forensic interviews have been up 22% and our treatment services have been up 43%.

We need your help. If you can sponsor a fund raising page for us or simply donate at our Crisis of our Lives campaign, we would be very grateful. Each small part helps to achieve the goal.