Maryvale Commits to Expand Its Service Offering and Reach to Help More Families
By now you likely have heard how important a child’s first five years are for setting a foundation for a healthy, well-adjusted life. As providers of early childhood education and a variety of services dedicated to improving the wellbeing of children and families, all of us at Maryvale understand the importance of the first five critical years for creating a foundation that will shape future physical and mental health, development, happiness, and achievement in school, the family, and society.
We are fortunate each day to work with and strengthen families. Some of the parents we serve had challenging childhoods themselves.
Children need to be nurtured, talked to, and supported by their parents and caregivers, especially during their first five years. Studies show when a child experiences neglect or trauma at a young age, it often manifests into deep-rooted issues that stay with a child throughout his or her life, especially making an impact on the child’s emotional development and social skills. Children who do not receive proper treatment from their parents during these early years are prone to behavioral issues, low self-esteem, lack a sense of belonging, develop depression, or can even suffer from mental health issues or addictions later in life. Even if parents are not physically abusing their children, children still can develop negative feelings and insecurities that affect them throughout their lifetime.
We recognize that many families today need help and support with the stress of balancing work and family, coping with financial hardship, and a host of other issues — ranging from substance abuse to the loss of loved ones. Strengthening families is central to our mission and is the key to keeping children safe and positioning them for academic and personal success. We often help families where the parents have suffered from unfortunate circumstances in their own upbringings, which impacts how they parent. We provide parental education, mental health services, and other support services through intervention with the family. We have made it a goal to break the cycle and provide help today that will also help the next generation.
It is this work where we can positively affect the trajectory of a child’s life (and possibly that child’s children) that is most meaningful to us.
Over the past year, we reflected on what new or expanded services we should endeavor, as we developed our strategic plan for the next three years and beyond, to help more children and families. Our opportunity was to envision the Maryvale of the future – the organization that will serve the needs of the underserved for the next 150 years.
With more underserved children, families, and individuals in need than ever before, we took a fresh look at ways to maximize our expertise and resources. The significance of the planning phase of our evolution was not lost on us. We closed our Short-Term Residential Therapeutic Program (STRTP) last summer after much consideration -- a program with roots back to our original orphanage in 1856. This led our team to ask, “What’s next?”
We are proud of the work we do every day to transform lives in the greater community. We will continue to offer and expand access to our high-quality programs and services at our two campuses in Rosemead and Duarte, including early childhood education, before and after-school care, and mental health outpatient services for children and families in need. We are currently exploring adding child and adolescent substance abuse and dual-diagnosis outpatient treatment services to our offering in the first half of 2022 to address the rapidly growing, unmet needs in our community. And with a strong history and set of resources for the provision of transitional housing and support, we are committed to offering a continuum of housing solutions that provide shorter-term transitional housing to prioritized populations, while we also explore the development of a longer-term community of support services.
Collaboration and partnership are other key aspects of our future. In fact, we just added “Collaboration” to our organization’s core values. To fill the gaps of a fragmented social services infrastructure for the underserved, Maryvale will actively seek partners to expand the scope and reach of our programming and services, both on and off our two campuses. With this partnership and interest in becoming more connected with neighboring residents, schools, businesses, and churches, we envision becoming a vibrant community hub for early education, parent and caregiver education, professional education, housing solutions, mental health and substance abuse treatment, and much more.
“We are so eager to embark on this bold new journey ahead of us,” said Steve Gunther, president and CEO. “As Los Angeles County’s longest-operating children’s charity, the opportunity for Maryvale to positively change more lives has never been stronger.”
In the meantime, Gunther encourages parents seeking educational or emotional health services during their child’s first five critical years to learn more about Maryvale’s early education and comprehensive community-based prevention, intervention, and treatment services for all families, including assisted tuition preschool and affordable mental health services to the under-insured and uninsured, as well as families and individuals with limited or no resources for such care.
