Bivona Child Advocacy Center delivers excellence in child abuse response, healing and prevention through collaborative service, awareness, education and leadership. We work with a multidisciplinary team (MDT) approach, meaning that medical evaluations, forensic interviews, family advocacy, and law enforcement all work under one roof to ensure that a child who has already been through an often horrific ordeal will only have to tell their story once, to trained professionals, who will work with their team to ensure that the child and their caregivers receive the care, services, and support they need throughout the entire process and begin their journey of healing from the abuse. Our vision is a world without child abuse, and we work towards that every single day by educating the community, raising awareness, and being a voice for some of the most vulnerable people in our community.

We raise awareness and educate the community by providing prevention education to individuals, companies, and youth serving organizations. In 2018, we started launched a pilot program aimed to educate children in school districts about interpersonal safety and to empower children with the tools to recognize unsafe situations as well as how to talk to trusted adults in their life should they find themselves in an unsafe situation. We partner with 23 agencies that make up our multidisciplinary team of professional experts in the field of child abuse including law enforcement, legal professionals, mental health therapists, family advocates, forensic interviewers and prosecutors. All of our partner agencies help us to raise awareness and play a role in Bivona's outreach. We are currently in the process of greatly increasing our mental health programming to better serve the children we see. While physical heath is indeed an important component of what we do, there are startling statistics coming out about the long term mental health effects of child abuse and neglect. Our aim is to address that as soon as possible after an event has occurred, to get survivors on the road to holistic health as soon as possible.

We are a small staff of 20 and we are abel to shift focus to help wherever is needed within our team. To meet the needs of our expanding programming, we will be increasing our staff by four employees . We are hiring an additional community educator who will expand our prevention education efforts. We are also hiring additional mental health staff and increasing our mental health partnerships with agencies who will be trained to treat children who have experienced trauma, specifically child abuse. We are incredibly grateful to the 23 partner agencies who are with us in this fight against child abuse and neglect. We couldn’t do what we do every day without their partnership and the support of our community.

Because Bivona provides comprehensive services, program evaluation occurs in a variety of ways, ensuring that the versatility of services offered is appraised on a regular basis. This is achieved through data collection and analysis as well as case data evaluation and tracking. Each case involving abuse that is referred to Bivona is tracked from intake through final disposition. We are able to use this data to identify areas of concern, client barriers to receiving services, where referrals are coming from and the demographics of the children we see. This allows us to ensure we are reaching the appropriate communities and allows us to track our progress as it relates to outreach and referrals.

Since our doors opened in 2004 we have evaluated over 20,000 children. The number of children we see each year has steadily increased - and we believe that is because Bivona Child Advocacy Center is known as the resource in our community for concerns of abuse because we have increased our outreach, education, and partnerships. We expect the number of children we see to continue to increase as a result of our efforts. This past year we rolled out a new in-school pilot program called Child Safety Matters, to one local school system. It had incredible success rates, and we will be further expanding that partnership into another districts this coming fall. The primary gap in services that we most recently identified is the lack of mental health support that traumatized children receive. To address this gap we have hired a full-time Director of Mental Health who is currently working to put a framework into place to ensure that every child who walks through our doors gets the help they need to be able to begin to heal . We are working to ensure that every child seen at Bivona is assigned a family advocate. Each family advocate is assigned 20-30 cases per month, with carry-over making their caseloads over 50 on a regular basis. We are currently assigning about 70% of children and are working towards meeting our goal of 100% of children assigned an advocate. It is anticipated that restructured responsibilities will balance caseloads allowing family advocates to reach more families.