Abbie Diehl has spent the last four years working with CornerHouse Child Advocacy Center as the Family Services Director. The Minneapolis-based CAC has been around 28 years and most of that time has, like many CACs, been spent working with forensic interviews of abused and maltreated children. That started to change in 2008 when a part-time staffer began meeting with caregivers during the child’s forensic interview, as well as providing limited follow-up support consisting of one or two phone calls. Then, in April 2013, Diehl became the Center’s first full-time Family Services Coordinator. “We’ve been able to help a lot more people since 2013. But now it’s time for me to go back to direct clinical service,” Diehl says. So, at the end of March 2017, Diehl departed CornerHouse.
She leaves behind an impressive body of work, research, and programs for her successor to assume responsibility. With a background in social work, Diehl was no stranger to providing help to families where they are, which often means in their homes. Partnering with local Masters of Social Work programs at area universities, Diehl developed the Home Visiting Program; a service that is now provided by two CornerHouse Family Services Specialists, Kristen Breuer and Inesa Zbarouskaya, to about 10% of CornerHouse’s 300 families served each year. “I feel super proud of what we’ve developed over the past four years. It’s come into the vision that we had four years ago. There’s so much opportunity for more outreach in the community and finding ways to do something different. It’s someone else’s turn to do more now.”
Diehl says CornerHouse has built their Home Visiting Program and around the six “protection factors”. This includes concrete support (like food and rent), knowledge of parenting and child development (like knowing when to discipline a child), nurturing and attachment, parent resilience (like coping with stress), social and emotional competency of the child (the ability of the child to manage stress), and social support (like other family members or church groups). What started as 15 weeks with just 15 families has grown as fast as the funding. Today, the families most at-risk can receive one weekly visit from CornerHouse staff for as long as six months.
Children and families who receive home visits may find themselves and CornerHouse Family Services staff talking about parenting skills, drawing, and journaling, or even practicing mind and body skills like meditation and breathing, or shaking and dancing, “Which the kids love…parents sometimes not so much,” Diehl says with a chuckle. “This is all driven by research,” says Diehl, adding, “We know how trauma and stress affect our mental and physical dysregulation. The Center for Mind-Body Medicine in D.C. provides a curriculum we use for things like active meditation and ‘chaotic breathing’ to counter dysregulation,” she says.
“It all works back to this philosophy of six protecting factors. They’re used widely by child welfare and family support programs, and we know when these six factors are present, it mitigates against child abuse and neglect. Our programs bolster these factors within families,” says Diehl. “We get good feedback from families. Our biggest complaint back in the first year was people wanting more visits.”
Diehl says CornerHouse Family Services staff visit families “from all walks of life – urban, rural, suburban, affluent and not. We get a full spectrum.” Diehl encourages other CACs who are considering home-visits to start, “If there are other child advocacy centers elsewhere wondering if they could do this, too: do it! There are so many barriers to accessing services, especially those that specialize in helping families with the aftermath of sexual and physical abuse. It’s hard for people. They’re in a state of shock with limited resources. It can even be hard for parents to get out of the house with kids. It’s worth the investment of staff time and paying for travel. Just focus where the most impact is possible.”
Soon, though, this program will become someone else’s responsibility. “I think given where my passion is, I’ve worked myself out of direct service. That’s great because I’ve helped more people get more help, but I miss the direct service piece personally. The next person is going to take CornerHouse and the Family Services programs to the next level. Family Services is the are the only department that’s solely grant funded here at CornerHouse, but we have stabilized funding now. The Victims of Crime Act funding from Congress, by way of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, has helped a lot in that it is a five-year renewable grant. This year and next is going to be at least what we have now,” she says.
Looking back, Diehl recalls one family that has utilized a lot of CornerHouse’s help. “They started with general support, then home visiting, and then support groups. It’s a family that struggles with generational trauma. Mom is a single parent, and she struggles with parenting because of her history of trauma, and her daughter experienced the same trauma. They have accessed every resource offered to them, and that’s made a lot of strides in mom’s ability to manage her stress and find ways to react or not react to the kids when they’re in their own states of trauma or acting out,” she says.
Diehl is quick to add, “This is not something you can tie up with a bow and say “this one’s done“, because she still struggles with anger. But she keeps coming back, which is telling. We’ve helped her create other networks of help. At every support group she comes to, she gets names and numbers of other moms in the same situation. She seeks support from them. Through the home visiting program we connected her kids to Big Brothers and Big Sisters, and that helps provide them with positive adult-child relationships. Through engaging with her over the years we’ve been able to lend our relationship collateral to other organizations, which helps the kids. It’s not perfect, and it’ll take a while, but I think the fact she keeps taking steps and building her own skills to parent is worth every bit of what we do.”
Diehl cites this as just one example of one family that has been impacted and has benefited from CornerHouse’s home visit program. As CornerHouse’s program continues to expand, more families will have access to the robust services that CornerHouse offers.