Mid-Florida
Services Offered
Adoption of Children from Foster Care
A dedicated team of highly motivated professionals works closely with families to best serve the children in our care. In North Central Florida, more than 120 children are waiting for their forever families. Most are or older or may have siblings, and some have physical, emotional or mental challenges. All long for the love and security only a forever family can provide.
To learn more about the adoption process, please visit our
Adoption page.
Contact:
Crisis Response Team
The Crisis Response Team offers flexible services designed to address therapeutic and environmental issues in the family to stabilize crisis situations quickly, with the ultimate goal of promoting family stability, preventing out-of-home placements and preserving the family unit. This includes therapy, domestic violence information and referral, anger management, child behavior management, emergent mental health and/or substance abuse issues, financial crises, and linkage to community resources and supports.
Dependency Case Management
Offers full-service case management to children and families in which abuse and neglect has caused court involvement. Services include monthly in-home supervision, preparation of court reports and court representation, case plan development, permanency planning and staffing, case documentation and data management, and coordination with other providers and community resources.
Family Partners and Family Team Coaching
Intense in-home counseling for families whose children have been identified as being at risk for abuse or neglect. Program provides counseling, parent education and support services.
Family Visitation Centers
These warm, homelike centers provide a safe place for children and their parents to spend time together during court-ordered supervised visits. At Family Visitation Centers, caring caseworkers demonstrate positive role modeling for parents while ensuring children are safe. Additionally, these centers allow divorced parents to exchange their children in a neutral setting without seeing one another, saving the children from exposure to more parental acrimony.
Volunteer and Intern Opportunities:
For more information on volunteer and intern opportunities, please visit our
Get Involved page.
Grandparents Raising Grandchildren
In the Mid-Florida Division service area, approximately 5,500 grandparents ages 60 and above are responsible for the care of their grandchildren under age 18. Grandparents who raise their grandchildren take on additional parenting roles and are a treasure to our society. Without grandparents' support, many children would end up in foster care. However, they often receive little acknowledgment for the effort involved in this intense parenting experience. Grandparents raising grandchildren are burdened with a myriad of stressful concerns when they accept the responsibility of raising a relative’s child, including limited income, children in need of special counseling, medical expenses, etc. Further, taking on the responsibility of care means entering into challenging public systems: schools, social services, legal institutions. At times, these encounters are intimidating and exhausting. To support the grandparents in our community who selflessly raise their grandchildren, we provide caregiver training and support, and assist in the finding of day care, legal assistance and transportation services.
Healthy Families
Healthy Families. Healthy Futures.
This voluntary in-home program helps increase positive parent/child interactions, improve parenting skills, ensure proper attention to health services, promote school readiness and develop self-sufficiency in parents. We offer services to qualified families expecting a child and to qualified families with children under age 5. Healthy Families provides information and guidance as well as emotional and practical support. Healthy Families is designed to help prevent child abuse and poor childhood outcomes.
Pictures from the 2009 Healthy Families graduation ceremony.
Contact:
Junior League of Ocala's Haven House
Haven House, a six-bedroom group home in Ocala, offers teen girls the chance to live in a large, lively family, nurtured for and cared by devoted staff members. Often, girls come to Haven House after living in foster care for many years, and they struggle with low self-esteem, making it difficult to appropriately deal with their emotions.
Once at Haven House, girls learn from positive role models who work to empower the teens with skills to build their self-confidence and social abilities so they may pursue their dreams and achieve their goals. We hope Haven House will help these girls establish themselves as independent adult members of society.
READ!
READ! is an educational intervention program designed to break the cycle of child abuse and neglect for increasing numbers of children. Based loosely on the “Born to Read” program developed by the Florida Library System, READ! includes all youth (ages 0-18) Children’s Home Society of Florida serves.
When families spend time together reading and discussing issues in their homes, they develop an open forum for growth and development.
Contact:
If you're interested in the READ! program or would like to donate new or gently used books, please e-mail
READMidFlorida@chsfl.org or call 800.300.9567.
Tot Spot Thrift Store
The Tot Spot raises funds for CHS programs and helps families in our programs by providing them with donated items. Often when children are removed from their homes and placed in foster care, they bring only the clothes on their backs. This store provides us with the opportunity to store donations and have a larger selection of items so we can give children and their families what they need when they need it. All families in our programs can shop at The Tot Spot for free. Our primary goal of The Tot Spot is to raise the success rate of the families in our programs, especially during this rough economic time.
The exciting renovations make this thrift store one of the largest and most unique stores in the area. Particular attention has been paid to the presentation and functionality of the facility. The color scheme starts with CHS' shades of pink and blue, which correlate to the boys' and girls' sides of the store, as well as other cheery pastels. The store carries children's and adults' clothing, furniture, jewelry, electronics, books, and so much more. The organized floor plan is stroller- and shopper-friendly. The store also features a play area in the center.
Tot Spot Thrift Store Location
710 North Main Street
Gainesville, FL 32601
(Parking in back)
Open:
Tuesday - Friday 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Saturday 9 a. m. - 4 p.m.
How you can help!
Shop:
By shopping at The Tot Spot, you will support services to help abused and neglected children in the community. One hundred percent of proceeds raised at The Tot Spot benefit our prevention, intervention and adoption programs.
Donate:
This is your opportunity to clean out our closet, jewelry boxes and extra furniture. Children’s Home Society of Florida will provide a tax receipt for your charitable donations.
Volunteer:
We're looking for volunteers who are passionate about our mission and dedicated to helping victims of child abuse. Our volunteers sort donations, wash donations, stock the store, monitor the child play area and sell the merchandise.
If you're interested in shopping, donating or volunteering at The Tot Spot, please e-mail TotSpot@chsfl.org or call 352.393.2826.