Family Crisis Center explains decision to halt advocacy program

UPDATE 1-11-19: The Rexburg-based Family Crisis Center has issued a statement explaining its reasons for ending a children’s advocacy program this week.

“The Family Crisis Center has been providing child advocacy, with the help and support of community partners since 2015 when it became necessary. Since that time the Family Crisis Center was able to provide services to over 300 children. In the past year the decision was made for the child advocacy services to transition to a separate organization. Much consideration and deliberation has allowed us to come to the decision to dissolve our child advocacy services at this time. We thank the child advocates for their commitment and passion and have full confidence that they will continue to provide services to those children in need.

The Family Crisis Center will continue to move forward, focusing on the domestic violence and sexual assault services we provide and the community relationships that are valuable to our response.”

The statement was signed by the Crisis Center’s Board of Directors, including Laurie Jones, Jeremy Cooley, Troy Rasmussen, Kendall Buttars, Mike Courtney, Melanee Sutton, Rick Schmitt, and Steve Dalling.

Original Story:

It was a normal day for Kimber Tower, Ashley Stallings and Nahoimin Aponte, who made up the Child Advocacy Program at the Family Crisis Center in Rexburg. But they were called into the executive director’s office shortly before noon where they also found the Family Crisis Center board president and lawyer.

“They said that they were dissolving the child advocacy component of the Family Crisis Center come 12 p.m.,” Aponte said. “So we had about 20 minutes notice.”

The women were given no warning that they were about to lose their jobs and no reason for the program being dissolved other than, “The Family Crisis Center is no longer serving children.”

They are child advocates and child forensic interviewers. Meaning, they step in when a child experiences abuse, talks to them about what happened and helps them through everything.

“And then while we’re interviewing a kiddo about what has happened to them, we have a child advocate that’s with the family going over resources and services that are available to that family and to that child,” Stallings said.

They have served more than 300 children in the upper valley region in nearly four years. The Family Crisis Center had a grant that funded the program through the end of June this year. When the funding was to end in June, they were planning to leave to start their own business. They applied for grants for their new business, the Upper Valley Child Advocacy Center, but because they weren’t planning to leave for several more months they do not have that funding yet. But that’s not stopping them from doing their work. They plan to work for free.

“We’ll be working from home, we’ll be working from offices,” Tower said. “We have been given this space in the Rigby Library to use as an office for the moment. Local law enforcement agencies have reached out to us and said if you need a place to do an interview, come to our place. It’s not ideal, but it’ll work.”

“It’s not about us,” Stallings said. “It’s not about our paycheck, but it’s about these kids that deserve this type of service.”

We did reach out to the Family Crisis Center to find out why the program was dissolved, however, they did not get back to us.