About the Children’s Village

A full-time residential facility for youth, Children’s Village is a trauma-responsive safe haven, restoring trust and hope for children and families who experience abuse, neglect, or are in crisis. Our vision is compassionate communities where every child feels safe, secure, and is nurtured in a stable and loving family.

www.thechildrensvillage.org discern right from wrong. Trauma-informed means the behavior is addressed as a secondary function – traumainformed means you focus on connecting with the child to understand why they lashed out and then how they can learn better tools to react in the future.

As a parent, my heart is tortured wondering what I would feel if my littles were the recipient of these behaviors. That said, when I see it, even aimed at my kids, my heart hurts more to wonder what’s happening at home and how I can figure out a way to get to know the parents so I can help to be part of their world.

Children’s Village is more than just a shelter home. In 2023, we’ve weathered a storm and have figured out how to aim at gaps in our community. We have three licensed therapists, on-staff resident and family support managers, we have coordinators who help youth get to and from their medical appointments, we have volunteers helping us answer the phones, we have passion for what we do, we have a fury for helping any and all we can.

I want to make something very clear: every person should have a cause that they champion and believe in. Kootenai County is ripe with a beautiful ecosystem of service organizations, please find your trusted cause and invest in time, treasure, and support. I have personally chosen Children’s Village as my chosen cause because I believe deeply that parents should have what I grew up with: neighbors present and monitoring and opening their homes to lift parents up through their challenges. Don’t we all deserve a village?

Have you ever experienced a hurricane? In our personal time in the Marine Corps before moving back to our beloved Coeur d’Alene, a hurricane passed through Pensacola, Florida, where we were stationed; there were hours of tumultuous weather and then silence as the eye of the storm passed. While in the eye, we walked outside to watch the most lovely of sunny days, but there was silence in the absence of birds who had fled, and our ears were popping as the direction of the cyclone above us switched. Soon, the rain exploded down to earth and the trees snapped; we all hunkered down for the finale of the hurricane.

Why have I chosen Children’s Village? Because the gaps in our community are clear as day through the eye of the storm, and these gaps are causing the trees to snap, which, if we allow, could deplete the beauty of our community.

Two gaps in particular are where we aim: helping families at their point of crisis before they enter state and federal systems, and supporting male teenagers to allow them an opportunity to rise above their circumstances. Our work will continue in our support of families from the child’s day of birth through age 13 male and 17 female. We will fill behavioral gaps as best we can, by expanding our therapy contracts from just Medicaid to also supporting the insurance companies contracted for working families too. We will seek grant funding and private funding to hire more therapists and caregivers in order to provide the services we know can be life altering. As we adapt, we are focused on building our new grant-funded family support center in 2023 and, in 2025, we are aiming at building a boys home to allow male youth in our community a better path.

There are storms everywhere in our world. Status quo cannot do and there are ways to change and adapt while also preserving the important pieces of the area in which we live. I can confidently say as a community member that I am committed to filling the gaps without altering the North Idaho that we all love. The risk of stagnancy is hard to express, because I would hate to see us falter at filling these gaps, the consequence of which would make our community very different than it is today.

We all weather storms in our lives, but should there be a need to weather it without the community lifting you up?

We may all differ in opinion, but I feel we may all agree to one thing – if a person is committed to getting themselves out of the gap, then why shouldn’t we as a North Idaho community assist them through their crisis?

I’m making a bit of an assumption here, but likely, at your next dinner party, those around you would be willing to admit that they’ve all experienced a point of crisis through which they have persevered. We can all benefit from normalizing that we all have found our way through something challenging, and that as a community, we should be comfortable assisting the next through theirs.