ANDERSON — The newly-formed board overseeing the creation of the county’s first child advocacy center toured Madison County’s facility and got advice from the director about what needs to happen to bring Hancock County’s facility to fruition.
The future Hancock County Child Advocacy Center earned its nonprofit status earlier this year. Now, its board — made up of local law enforcement, prosecutors and other community stakeholders — is preparing to raise funds and is searching for a property to serve as a home for the center.
The purpose of a child advocacy center to give young crime victims a safe way to talk about the abuse or neglect they’ve suffered; somewhere warm and welcoming, away from the guns and badges of a police department, to open up about what’s happened to them.
The board this week toured Madison County’s child advocacy center to give its non-law enforcement members — and the community — a better idea of what a local facility might look like and what a possible start-up and operating budget might be.
This insight will only help them better plot a path to the future, officials say.
Some board members have already been in contact with local charitable groups, seeking more information about grants, said Sgt. Bridget Foy, a detective with the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department, who is serving as the board president.
Members will spend the coming weeks crafting letters to send to area businesses explaining their mission and asking those groups to keep them in mind when planning their charitable donations. They also will be combing real estate ads for an open storefront or structure that could one day house the Hancock County center.
It appears the biggest funding hurdles they’ll face before opening the doors will be covering the cost of property and the video surveillance equipment needed to make an advocacy center successful, said local deputy prosecutor and board member Cathy Wilson.
Victim interviews completed at child advocacy centers bring continuity to criminal investigations and lessen the burden on the victim, experts say.
The director of Madison County’s child advocacy center, a facility called Kids Talk, spoke with the board for more than two hours Thursday, answering questions about the work that went into opening the place and what keeps it open now.
Kids Talk is located in the heart of Anderson in a converted ranch-style house, Director Denise Valdez said. The facility opened in 2014 after raising about $80,000 to get up and running, as an arm of Aspire Indiana, a mental health advocacy group. That first year, they conducted about 100 interviews with young crime victims.
Now, the place runs on a $350,000 budget — all generated by grants and donations — which covers the cost of its building rent, the salaries of its four full-time staffers, Valdez said. Last year, they assisted more than 750 kids.
Kids Talk’s facility consists of two interview rooms, where specially-trained, non-law enforcement interviewers can talk with kids about what happened to them, Valdez said.
The conversation is captured by surveillance cameras and broadcast into another room in the building, where police, prosecutors and caseworkers from Indiana Department of Child Services watch live, making notes and relaying questions back to the interviewer through an ear piece, she said.
This practice ensures a child is interviewed about criminal allegations just once, minimizing any fear or discomfort they might have, Valdez said.
The child never knows investigators are listening or even that they’re in the same building, she said. The child only meets with a police officer or prosecutor after the interview and only if a disclosure about a crime is made, she said.
There are more than 1,000 child advocacy centers across the globe, and when implemented correctly, they can improve a community’s response to child abuse and neglect, according to National Children’s Advocacy Center, a training facility for child abuse prevention professionals that opened in Alabama in 1985.