Juliette's House

Ultimately, we want our community (our service area) to be the safest place in Oregon to raise children. To do so means diminishing the impact of stigma around child abuse to ease the very emotional process of disclosing, so that services, like ours, can be accessed and healing can begin. Likewise we want the alleged perpetrator/s to be identified and dealt with appropriately, so the child remains safe. It means extraordinary coordination with community partners, which we fortunately have. It also means educating the public as to what constitutes abuse and neglect, what it looks like, how to respond to a disclosure and how to report if one believes abuse to be happening. This public dialogue is critical in order to weave children’s well-being into the very fabric of our community, thus setting a high agenda for children’s safety and essentially becoming an impediment for predators.

As mentioned above, continuing education, both broad and targeted, are required to impact this public health crisis. Likewise, maintaining a highly trained clinical and family support staff, growing our mental health program with additional therapists, along with a strong team of education facilitators is vital to our work.

Juliette’s House has a CEO with over 30 years’ experience in non-profit healthcare. He’s now been with us over 4 years and has no plans to retire anytime soon. Our Board is extremely strong, very active, diversifying and representative of our community. Our staff is also strong highly experienced, and increasingly bilingual and bicultural. Some staff have been with us almost since we opened in 1997. We are affiliated with Oregon Child Abuse Solutions, the state wide network of 20 centers like Juliette’s House, of which our CEO is the current Board Chair. We are also accredited by the National Children’s Alliance, which sets the national quality standards for the work we do with abused children. Our balance sheet is also strong, no meaningful debt beyond simple accounts payable, and a cash reserve that will last us about three months. While this three-month runway is not ideal, and our endowment is still underfunded, we recognize that we are in a stronger position than most. Nevertheless, the greatest challenge we face in this current environment is a disruption to the momentum we have been building for the last three and a half years. We are now at nearly double our 2015 budget, and have grown by 20-30% annually each year since, providing much needed services to protect and heal our county’s children. We have brought many part-time staff into permanent, full-time work with competitive benefits. We have launched our therapy program, and are already looking to expand it significantly. We’ve added a therapy dog, we are remodeling our 23-year old building with funds in hand from individual donors and grants, expanded our Hispanic and Native American outreach, and tripled our prevention education programs…but, with the chilling impact this pandemic is having on our community, this momentum threatens to be lost at a time when we need to be growing, not contracting, if we are going to fulfill our goal of making Yamhill County the safest place to raise children in Oregon.

As previously mentioned, we are now at nearly double our 2015 budget, and have grown by 20-30% annually each year since, providing much needed services to protect and heal our county’s children from abuse. We have brought many part-time staff into permanent, full-time work with competitive benefits. We have doubled the number of abuse cases we are assessing. We have launched our therapy program, and are already looking to expand it significantly. We’ve added a therapy dog, we are currently remodeling our 23-year old building with funds-in-hand from individual donors and directed grants, expanded our Hispanic and Native American outreach, and tripled our prevention education programs. Now, we are looking to expand our in-school education workshops, add a high school program and develop workshops to support educators who have in their classrooms kids who have been abused – how to work with them, what to do if a child is triggered or acting out, how to manage their own mental health, etc. We want to develop child abuse education materials and programs for vulnerable populations, such as migrant workers. We hope to also in the next year launch a prevention education program for kids with special needs – physical and cognitive disabilities – whom we know are extraordinarily vulnerable. We will continue our work with state and federal legislators to advocate for more and better services for children’s safety and well-being. In addition, we need to physically add to our campus, so we’ll be undertaking a capital campaign very soon. Staff and Board development remain high on our priorities, as is ongoing community outreach to tell the stories of our kids and how they are overcoming their trauma and building resilience with the help of Juliette’s House.