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Children's Relief Nursery expands to Mid-county

HEATHER HILL
THE MIDCOUNTY MEMO

Both nurseries feature classrooms, therapy rooms and an outdoor play space for kids who may not get enough fresh air at home. The new nursery is conveniently located on the Number 71 bus line at 1245 S.E. 122 Ave.
Courtesy Carolyn Burleigh
An organization dedicated to preventing abuse and trauma of very young children has launched a new site in Mid-county.

What started as a community cry for action after a baby was shaken to death in Eugene 30 years ago has grown into a statewide network of 13 centers that focus on children from before birth to age four. Called Relief Nurseries, they provide comprehensive services that envelop both children and their families with therapy and support. The main Child Relief Nursery in Portland, a certified trauma center, has operated for the past decade in St. Johns. Last month, with former governor Barbara Roberts, a CRN emeritus board member, officiating, the doors opened on its new nursery at 1245 S.E. 122nd Ave.

“Just in these 10 years so much has changed with the east side, a lot of the poverty has moved east,” said Lisa Wiebe, the executive director of Children's Relief Nursery. “It has always been a vision to expand because we know there are more neighborhoods that need services. No question the east side was the best place to go with the expansion. There is a dire need and a cry from the community for more services.”

The Mid-county relief nursery aims to aid about 45 families from an area south of I-84, north of Division, east of 102nd and west of 167th Avenues. The boundaries are dictated by their bus pickup route, which itself is designed in consideration of the very young children the nursery serves. Organizers are delighted, however, that a major bus route also runs by the new location to facilitate the transportation needs of parents as well.

The new facility will start small, though, “It is filling up rather quickly,” said Wiebe, “The needs are very deep on the eastside, and we are thrilled to get there, but we don't want full classes. It is easier to stage into the new facility and slowly add.”

Formerly, the child welfare system saw removing the child from the stressful situation as the solution, but relief nursery proponents believe foster care severs the bond of stability also essential to healthy development during those formative years. “The first years of life are where core development happens,” commented Wiebe, “Brain research helps us understand these formative months in the human life are so critical.”

Former Governor Barbara Roberts, left, a Children's Relief Nursery Emeritus Board Member, was on hand at the opening of a new nursery in east Portland.
Courtesy Carolyn Burleigh
A new model for early intervention based on parent-child psychology has emerged to both treat the parents that are often responsible for the trauma and the child adversely affected by it. Relief nursery organizers act based on evidence that children raised in stressful family situations, whether as a result of poverty, violence, mental illness, or even simple unpreparedness have more challenges in school. They quote psychologists who have correlated a link between children who have witnessed such trauma and those that replicate the anti-social behavior also displayed by their parents.

Though some at-risk parents come to relief nurseries on their own, most families enter the program through the courts system or referrals by those in the medical community, including community health nurses, emergency room personnel, pediatricians and Department of Human Services staff. After the initial referral, a CRN therapist assesses the family's situation, decides if the program is applicable and if so composes a family goals plan to alleviate the family stress that caused the trauma, and to bring the child up to age-appropriate development. The case assessment process and the outreach involved in forging community relationships to feed referrals into the program and into other resources, will take some time to grow in the new location, said Wiebe.

Though the new site is about a quarter of the size of the St. Johns location, it provides the same services. In addition to individual child/parent therapy sessions, relief nursery programs include parenting education, home visits, mental therapy, emergency childcare and small-group classes where very young children, separated into age groups, attend therapeutic classes with a high teacher/child ratio for three and a half hours, twice a week. The St. Johns location has two teachers and one to two volunteers per eight-child class. Children attend on either a Monday/Wednesday or a Tuesday/Thursday schedule. The classrooms lack any electronic devices and generally involve wood furnishings, primary colors, and themes similar to a home space, with areas designed to encourage imagination and creation.

Therapy includes physical as well as mental conditioning, as children's deficiencies differ. Some children have never been spoken to, and require more language training. Some have spent their entire lives in confined spaces. In such cases, therapists find that dance therapy and exercises that provide core strengthening help build stability and coordination for the child to move more confidently.

For example, the North Portland location features a physical therapy room with buoyant straps hanging from the ceiling. “When a child hangs it develops core muscles,” explained Wiebe, “so when a child stands and feels strength it actually helps ground them. We forget as adults that so much happens in a young child's body that is simply what is necessary to how you grow up to be a healthy adult.” Five of the relief nursery's teachers have been trained in Music Together, a program designed to activate physical and mental development in children and infants. They incorporate music from around the world to teach children moving and dancing. “It's not just about having fun,” said Wiebe, “this is how humans learn our skills, drumming and dancing helps the body find its core.”

Children also learn responsibility and accountability through serving themselves and clearing their plates after the breakfast and lunch meals provided by the nursery. All classes take place between 9 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. Caseworkers spend afternoons reinforcing the lessons and progress established at the nursery with in-home visits to help coach the parents on their end.

The new facility has five staff members, four from the St. Johns location. Each brings at least four years of experience specifically with the Children's Relief Nursery model. Leslie Brown, a certified child parent psychologist who has formerly run that portion of the program at St. Johns, will direct services from the east Portland site, an area she also calls home.

The narrow focus on a specific age range and the use of child/parent psychotherapy sets the relief nursery model apart from other child welfare programs. Therapists treat parents and children together, some already in foster care. They seek to work through the trauma, and in the case of separated families, carefully identify if reunification is possible. The Parenting is a Pleasure support group teaches the basics of parenting and childcare in an environment of peer reinforcement. In the interest of preventing abuse and neglect before it begins, CRN also hosts parent/infant classes, for which women in their third trimester and mothers of infants gather to learn parenting skills. This program both gives isolated women a group of other mothers with which to reference proper child/parent behavior, and also helps therapists screen for post partum depression, a common cause of neglect.

To combat another contributing factor, poverty, the nursery keeps a supply of donated child's clothes, some soft toys and food to ensure that parents have the standard essentials for childcare. Participating parents may also schedule to drop their children in for respite care, a day care room at the nursery available for parents who need some personal time to accomplish adult tasks. “Our program is a wrap-around program to make sure that the stress that has caused the neglect has been removed so the parent has a chance to not worry about food and clothing but what do I need to do to succeed,” said Wiebe.

Since the organization's services target a vulnerable, already stressed population, it provides its services free of charge. With an average per family cost of $9,634 - less than half the cost of a child in foster care -in an average year, the St. Johns relief nursery serves 175 children from 140 families. Local businesses help keep the St. Johns location afloat. NW Natural, Umpqua Bank, and Standard Insurance have representatives on their board. Initial funding for the new, satellite site came from the Portland Children's Levy ($300,000), The M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust ($230,000) and the Collins Foundation ($120,000). However, like in St. Johns, community support keeps the doors open. In its most recent annual report, the CRN reported $1.8 million in revenue and $1.7 million in expenses. Other major supporters include the Meyer Memorial Trust, the Oregon Community Foundation, the John Templeton, Anne and Eli Shapira and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations, as well as the Oscar G. and Elsa Mayer Family foundations.

Wiebe expects to see the same community partners that support the St Johns program to rally around the east Portland center, a first step in the fight to prevent other endemic social problems in the area. “It is much more expensive later if we don't work with it now,” she said. “Primary supporters of this kind of program - the medical and the criminal justice community - understand mediation and mitigation of social problems in school is difficult and expensive, and juvenile detention and prison is even more expensive.”

Readers who would like to donate or volunteer at the CRN's new eastside location can call 503-564-0164. The CRN website is http://crn4kids.org.
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