Third Century Capital Campaign

For over 170 years Children’s Friend and Family Services has been helping Essex County’s children, their families and, in turn, their communities through compassionate and innovative counseling, mentoring parenting and child psychology services. Children’s Friend has been there whenever needed, in the homes, schools, the courts and in day care centers of North Shore and Merrimack Valley children. For many the organization is the first line of contact in crisis, for some it is their last hope. In serving over 4,500 youngsters and their families annually, we are trusted to engage with, and stabilize, many of the community’s most fragile and at-risk youth. Our staff has literally cared for tens of thousands of your neighbors, friends or work colleagues. We have done so quietly, unassumingly and effectively, while continuing to make Essex County a much better place to live, work and raise a family.

Now, for the first time in history, Children’s Friend is turning to the community it has served so well and faithfully, for nearly two centuries, to ask for support.

Our Salem site, a historic home built in 1809 and deeded to Children’s Friend in 1955, serves children from Salem, Lynn, Peabody, Danvers, Topsfield, Hamilton, Wenham and Beverly. Our clinicians are pressed to meet the burgeoning requests for help at this location. As our clinical and support team has grown from 8 to 31 and client visits have increased from 500, twenty years ago, to 11,000 in 2006, the physical inadequacies of our current facility have become painfully apparent. Those considerations, added to the critical needs of: adequate parking; better access to our county wide population; more privacy for clients; the need to attract the most qualified staff possible, by offering the most functional facility for them to work in; as well as the constraints dictated by a 200 year old current structure, all have contributed to the decision to move to a new location. As one of our Directors recently noted, “Our present impact on the community and its youth is now gated”.

After 50 years at its current central Salem site, Children’s Friend now stands on a plateau for service growth and enters a new chapter in its distinguished history. The organization has just taken advantage of a wonderful opportunity, offered by the City of Salem, to purchase the former Endicott School building at 110 Boston Street.

This facility offers double the current space, enabling us to serve the significant number of children and families now waiting for help. It provides ample parking and improves client access. We will have the chance, after substantial renovations, to configure the new space to meet the needs for community and parent trainings as well as for the delivery of the most up-to-date counseling and mentoring technologies, especially those involved in employing creative arts in the treatment of children and their families. Finally, the extremely high annual dollar cost of maintaining our current historic building will be substantially reduced.

So, what will it take to continue the outstanding work of Children’s Friend clinicians in an environment that will allow them to have greater impact on greater numbers of North Shore youth… a community investment of $1.3M. The exterior of the Endicott School is structurally sound but the interior needs substantial refurbishment to accommodate growth of the current Children’s Friend staff and the vision for future leading edge services.

Philanthropic resources will be developed over a three-year period and capital naming opportunities, as well as various levels of donor recognition have been developed. We sincerely hope that during this special, one time capital initiative, many members of our community will step forth and want to be counted as making a quality difference for the children of Essex County.