By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
Upon hearing in-depth what the Family Crisis Center offers to its patrons during a Barton County Health Department in-service meeting about a year ago, Misty Trudeau, chief financial officer at the health department, vowed to secure a grant to work alongside the Family Crisis Center. Tuesday morning, Health Department Director Karen Winkelman asked the Barton County Commission to approve a Community-Based Child Abuse Prevention Grant in the amount of $160,956.
"We had wanted to do a project with Family Crisis Center for quite some time," Winkelman said. "This project is to support community-based efforts to develop, operate, and expand initiatives to prevent child abuse and neglect, coordinate resources and activities to support families to reduce the likelihood of childhood abuse and neglect, and to foster understanding and knowledge of diverse populations affected in treating childhood abuse and neglect."
The grant is federally funded and handled through the Kansas Children's Cabinet and Trust Fund. The Barton County Health Department will serve as a pass-through to get the funds to the Family Crisis Center, and also offer social work support for the project. Crisis Center Executive Director Kylee Graves said parents can already receive childcare support from the Department of Children and Families if they can show proof of employment. Part of the grant will be used to assist parents searching for jobs.
"If you can't find daycare, how you you get a job?," said Graves. "This grant is going to hopefully bridge that gap so we can get parents back into the workforce so they can access the resources that are already out there."
Graves recently hired a new staff member. The grant will also pay for that employee and the social worker from the health department to attend a week-long parenting class through the Conscious Discipline curriculum. That education will be used in outreach programs for area families. The focus of the grant will be to prevent child abuse in children ages 0-5.