Children's Crisis Center

I wanted to share an experience I had last week while I was in Folsom CA for a work trip. There are ~30 people in my group and we took a few hours one afternoon to volunteer at the Sacramento Children’s Crisis Center. It was heart wrenching…it was all I could do to keep the tears inside. The kids were so cute and I wanted to take them all home with me.

The center is a place where they can immediately place kids in bad situations while they figure out foster care or their parent’s can work out their issues – biggest problem right now is Methamphetamines. The average stay at the center is only 22 days. The counselor took us on a tour and it was a really nice campus – they had a separate house for each age group – starting at infants through late teens. When we walked into the house for the infants and toddlers, this little girl who had just started to walk came right up to me and started clapping her little hands. I started clapping my hands with her and her whole face lit up and she started laughing. They told us that we could not touch the kids, so I could not scoop her up like I wanted to. That was tough… I am getting teared up just thinking about it.

We had all brought different craft activities to do with the kids. They set us up in the gym and we were all assigned different age groups. I had 10-13 year old girls and we had brought in bags of beads and stuff to make bracelets. Several of the girls asked if they could make more than one bracelet because they wanted to give one to their Mom when she came to visit them (heart breaking). I had one girl tell me that she was supposed to “Get Out” that day but her Dad had not shown up at court, so she was hoping he would be there the next day (again heart breaking). The girls just soaked up the praise when I told them how beautiful the bracelets were that they had made and how I loved their choice of colors. They were just starved for attention.

One of the guys brought a bunch of old hard drives and had put together an instruction list of how to take them apart and put them back together. It was a perfect thing for his group of teenage boys. They loved it and what a great way to get them interested in electronics. Then there was an activity to make pillows out of T-shirts and several of the kids were excited about that because they only had plastic pillows. I’m sure that was for sanitation reasons but…how sad. There were several other activities and the kids really had a good time.

It was so overwhelming to me that all these beautiful kids were not a priority for their parents. I just kept thinking…how could someone not love them and want to take care of them?

Overall experience was incredible…best two hours I have put in all year.