The Florence Crittenton Agency

Hello everybody,

We visited with Cile at the Florence Crittenton Agency, and the folks at Florence Crittenton work mostly with troubled teenage girls and their families. I tell ya', my initial reaction was very similar to the Helen Ross McNabb's Gateway Center where they work with the young boys: it's just heartbreaking.

Cile talked about these girls, some as young as 12 and 13 years old, that have been victims of abuse – child abuse, sexual abuse, some of them are pregnant. It’s absolutely unbelievable that it happens. These kids need to be loved and nurtured and what some of these kids have gone through is just terrible.

Here is an agency that is helping kids put their lives back together. You’ve got these young girls and their lives have just totally crumbled – totally fallen apart – and a lot of times they're left out there on the street to fend for themselves. But they don’t have any ability to pick themselves back up because they weren't raised with those tools. The Florence Crittenton Agency is helping them with those skills. First thing to picking them back up is just being there for them and telling them it’s going to be okay. Second you give them the tools to get back out there in the real world. I liked the fact they get the family involved, too, because they need to learn.

I think one of the key things we talked about during our visit was these kids are part of a culture and their parents are abusing them and their parents probably abused them, and so on. And typically the abused become abusers. But when you break that cycle, it changes generations. These girls will become mothers – some of them very soon, but Florence Crittenton Agency breaks that cycle so that their children don’t become a part of that cycle of abuse.

It's like United Way says you got to get to that root cause, and it may be years before we see the effects, but for every life they touch at Florence Crittenton it’s a life that's changed for the better. And ultimately I think that’s what United Way is all about – empowering people to give them the ability to take care of themselves.

I continue to be amazed with the people that are out there with the serving hearts that work in these agencies. Ya' know you don't become the director of The Florence Crittenton Agency because you want to be in a high powered position. That’s a tremendous job that Cile’s doing because it’s in her nature – in her heart that she’s doing something she loves. It’s probably some of the most important work someone could ever do. But we have these people working hard and that’s what life is all about – helping other folks.

Blog you soon!
Dave Bennett

P.S. We're workin' on the funny video, so I'll be bloggin' about that soon!