Community

Holiday season push to help children

Local agency’s beautifully decorated centre helps vulnerable kids

  • Child Advocacy Centre acts as one-stop for victims.
  • Pandemic was the perfect storm for abuse
  • Holiday fundraiser gets big local support

The Child Advocacy Centre (CAC) of Kelowna hopes you will ask yourself ‘who’s on your list’ this holiday season and consider adding one more.

It's launched a fundraising campaign aimed at further helping kids in tough situations.

“It’s too bad we need to be here in the first place,” Executive Director Ginny Becker told Kelowna10.

“We get told a lot from the community, ‘what a shame we need a Child Advocacy Centre,’ and I couldn’t agree more. We’re one of those agencies that would love to work ourselves out of the job.”

According to its website, one in three children in the Okanagan will experience abuse or neglect in their lifetime.

The CAC is a multi-disciplinary collective environment. It partners with organizations like the RCMP, Interior Health, West Bank First Nation, and the Central Okanagan Elizabeth Fry Society.

Because the centre acts as a hub for these organizations, it aims to minimize the impact a child experiences following a traumatic experience. It can have a negative mental effect to retell their story numerous times to various people.

Deliberate calm

The facility purposefully created a calm and cheerful environment using colourful, locally made artwork, brightly painted walls, teddy bears scattered around the office, soft music, and quiet rooms.

There, children gain access to community resources, alongside medical and emotional attention from doctors. When law enforcement is involved, the officers are mandated to wear regular clothes (not uniform) to appear less intimidating to a vulnerable child.

The centre opened in January 2020, with its first client coming through the doors at the end of that month. Once the pandemic set in, it experienced more demand for help.

“COVID-19 created a perfect storm around child maltreatment,” Becker said.

“Kids who already lived in vulnerable environments, then being isolated in those environments and not being seen by the teachers, coaches, people who are trained to watch for those signs … it served as this really tragic validation for why we need to be here.”

Who's on your list?

Thanks to community partners who chose to remain anonymous, CAC is launching a fundraising initiative called ‘Who’s on your list?’

From now until the end of December, donations will be matched up to $100,000. Donations are accepted online.

The Child Advocacy Centre is a non-profit organization that relies on community support and donations to continue operating. The work they do, Becker said, is important to the whole community.

“I really believe that childhood trauma is at the root of so much else that plagues our community over time; social issues that we talk about.

“If we can do a better job of supporting children up front, early in trauma, we change the future. We really do make a better outcome down the road which changes our community for the whole, for everybody.”

Published 2021-11-24 by David Hanson

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