We Care Hotline

The Children’s Services Council undertook the We Care Hotline project early in its history. Any child or teen can call this toll-free crisis hotline and talk aboutt problems, knowing that help is confidential. In one year alone, almost 600 calls were fielded, and undoubtedly countless
lives saved.

Resource Mother’s Program and Eye-Check

The Eye-Check and Resource-for-Mothers programs focus on the prevention of vision-related problems and difficult births. These programs teach proper pre-natal care  and eye disease screening for infants and young children.

Healthy Kids Insurance

This low-cost, comprehensive healthcare coverage offers a solution to parents who need to fill the gap between private insurance plans and Medicaid. School-aged children are provided preventive and therapeutic medical care. Over 1300 children benefit from this program and it has expanded to include five counties throughout the Heartland.

Family Safehouse

In tandem with the First United Methodist Church of Sebring, the Children’s Services Council and Children’s Services Foundation renovated a beautiful home that now provides transitional housing for battered women and children. While the housing is short-term, this refuge offers women a chance to find a job, childcare and housing while they put together the pieces of a life shattered by violence.

Avon Park Youth Academy

This residential commitment facility, once an airbase, is situated on 37 acres of land and will soon be the third largest site of its kind. The Youth Academy rehabilitates youthful offenders by teaching them job and life skills and discipline. By removing teens from their homes and avoiding adult prison, these youths are given a second chance few are afforded.

Children’s Advocacy Center

"It shouldn't hurt to be a kid," and because of the Children's Advocacy Center, child victims of abuse have a safe place to tell their story, secure in the knowledge their abuser can't reach them. The Children's Advocacy Center is a child abuse prevention initiative between the Children Services Council & Children's Services Foundation of Highlands County.  Its purpose is to provide a mechanism for collective collaboration among all the children's services agencies in our county.  The Advocacy Center provides a child-friendly facility, where victims of abuse can come and feel safe, while all agencies involving themselves in the case are available, on site, to meet the needs of the child. The most important segment comes when all the agencies devise a collective course of action for the case.  The center has been in operation since October of 1998 and is one of a handful in the state of Florida.  Accredited by the National Children's Alliance in its first year of operation, the center sees more than five hundred children annually.  In cooperation with Highlands County Board of County Commissions, who physically maintains the facility, the non-profit Children's Services Foundation supplies the infrastructure needed through their private fund-raising efforts.
.