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In 1973, an Orange County psychologist and his wife, Dr. Donald and Lois Verleur, opened their home to a runaway teenage girl. That act of kindness, nourished by the Verleurs' vision of how they could help others and their love of kids has grown into Olive Crest Homes and Services for Abused Children, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary of service to local communities. Working from the knowledge that every 10 seconds a child in the United States is reported beaten, raped, verbally assaulted or severely neglected, Olive Crest has committed itself to healing young lives by providing shelter, loving care and professional treatment to abused, abandoned, and at-risk youth. From its simple beginning in the Verleurs' home, Olive Crest now has offices and facilities in Orange, Los Angeles, and San Diego counties, the Inland Empire, Las Vegas, and Seattle. Its 700 employees serve children, birth through 22 years of age, through such services as residential homes, foster care and adoption services, transitional and independent living programs, therapeutic education centers, and family preservation programs. Almost everything that Olive Crest does as an agency has something to do with preserving the family. In situations where children have not yet been removed from their homes, they offer counseling programs and work with families when they are in crisis with the goal of helping that family stay together. Parental education programs are offered so that parents can learn to be more effective. Olive Crest's main office in Santa Ana offers family counseling services in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese, one of the few agencies in Southern California that does so. Its biggest facility is a ranch-like setting in Perris. Olive Crest's reach includes working closely with children so they develop into fine parents. "We're preserving them as individuals so that they can have healthy families in the future," says Tim Bauer, director of development for Olive Crest. "In a sense, we're preserving their family and, hopefully, being able to break the cycle of abuse so that in their future family that cycle won't occur." Like most other foster care agencies, Olive Crest struggles with the problem of not having enough families available to take in children at risk. More than 100 children each month are turned away because the nonprofit organization is unable to serve them due to the lack of qualified, high-quality foster homes. A recent factor in this equation is the desire of a same-sex couple to be adoptive parents. Late last year a state probe found, in a decision that has been appealed by Olive Crest, that the agency's San Diego office discriminated against a lesbian couple attempting to adopt a child. Olive Crest CEO Donald Verleur II defends the agency and its work. "Olive Crest was founded on Judeo Christian principles, and we make no apologies for our values. For 30 years, these values have served us and our families well. Olive Crest abides by the laws of the state and the Constitution of the United States. Our No. 1 priority is to place children in the best possible home." At press time, the state had yet to make a ruling on Olive Crest's appeal. Of course, foster parents are considered heroes in the organization. Addressing one of the most heart-wrenching aspects of foster care, Bauer says, "We have quite a few babies that come to us as drug-exposed infants. The foster parents that work with those babies just pour their hearts and souls into holding these babies and caring for them, even when they have drugs in their system. It's just such an unbelievable challenge, such an unbelievably selfless thing for them to do." A volunteer mentoring program is another of the ways that Olive Crest provides one-on-one adult relationships for the youth in their care. Olive Crest recruits and trains community volunteers. These volunteers go through background checks and complete all necessary applications before they are actually able to mentor a child. Olive Crest has a department that makes the matches between mentors and children based on similar interests and other factors. "A lot of our kids say that it develops into a true friendship, partly because they know the mentor is not being paid and they're doing it out of the goodness and generous part of their heart," says Bauer. "Unfortunately, those kids haven't had a lot of that in their life, so it becomes a very meaningful and important thing to them." Olive Crest has been working with children and families in the Inland Empire since 1979, but it was in 2000 that a nearly 10-year vision of CEO Verleur to devise a unique way to help local kids became a reality in the form of the Inland Community Children's Ranch in Perris. The Children's Ranch consists of four 3,000-square-foot residential group homes and a 14,000-square-foot Community Education Center, also known as the Ranch School. Part of the dream for the ranch came from the desire of some of Olive Crest's major Inland Empire supporters, such as Mission Inn owner Duane Roberts and his wife Kelly, to do something dramatic and meaningful. Things really started to move when HomeAid Riverside became involved in the project. HomeAid Builder Captains Beazer Homes, Forecast Homes, Richmond American Homes, and William Lynn Homes, Inc. completed the first phase of the Ranch, the four residential group homes, in May 2000. The second phase of the project, the Ranch School, was completed several months later. HomeAid brought in nearly 500 companies, subcontractors and suppliers to build the facilities on a largely pro-bono basis. Each of the four group homes houses six children, ages 13 to 18. Two of the homes are for boys, two are for girls, and there is never more than a three-year age spread among those living in a single house. These homes have a specialized program called "dual diagnosis," which means they work with kids who not only have mental health issues, but also have a history of substance abuse. The homes offer substance abuse education and relapse prevention programs in addition to the regular counseling, therapy and behavior modification programs. The homes at the Ranch are rated as Level 12 group homes. The state of California gives different ratings to group homes determined by the level of professional care the homes provide and the amount of care the children require. The highest level in California is Level 14, so the children who come into Olive Crest's care have a lot of needs and require constant supervision. A master's-level therapist is assigned to each home. The therapist will meet with the kids on an individual level, on a group level, and do family therapy with them. Some of the kids have come from Juvenile Hall and may have had some fringe gang activity, enough to think that it's cool to be part of a gang. Some have been heavily involved in gangs and are desperately trying to get out. "They're adolescent girls or boys and we want them to live their adolescence because they come to us such little adults," says Jamie Lamb, director of development, Inland Empire for Olive Crest. "They've lived a very long, hard life. Olive Crest tries to take children who would otherwise be institutionalized and put them in as normalized a setting as possible, a normal family setting." The Ranch School, which has five classrooms, takes kids with emotional and behavioral problems from eight local school districts - Riverside County, Riverside Unified, Moreno Valley, Val Verde, Banning, Jurupa, Lake Elsinore, and Hemet. The kids are sent there to work on whatever problems they may have that makes it tough for them to function in a regular public school. The Ranch School's main goal is to get these kids back into public school as soon as possible. "We work on behavior in the classrooms until we feel that they are ready," says the school's director, L.C. "Bob" Anderson. "Then we start the transition to public school for one or two periods a day. If everything goes well, we go to four periods a day. Everything we do is to work on kids' behavior, so that when they go back to public school they won't have a problem when they get there. It makes it difficult some days because you deal with 40 different behavioral problems, but we get through the day. You come back tomorrow, it's a brand-new day and you start all over again." The people who work at Olive Crest view success in relation to the individuality of the children and families who come to them for help, each with their own strengths, each with their own challenges and struggles. "In some of our programs, it was pretty easy to see success when a child was able to finish a grade in school or hug the foster mom and tell her that she loved her," says Tim Bauer. "In our (Residential Treatment Center) program, if we were able to entice a kid to stick with us for a week, that was the biggest and best thing that had ever happened in that kid's life. So we try to view success by saying, 'Has this person made progress for who they are and for trying to live a productive life?' There are so many things that are success, and recognizing them and celebrating them is something that is really important in our field." Information: 800.550.CHILD. For foster care and adoption: 800.74.FOSTER. In Orange County: 714.543.KIDS. In Riverside: 909.686.8500. Michael J. Medley is a senior writer with Inland Empire Family Magazine. |
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