Children’s visitation center has already shown its value

By COLIN MURPHEY
The Chez Hope Children’s Visitation Center may have only been open for a few weeks but the center, the services it facilitates and the people who provide them are already making a difference in the community.
According to the Chez Hope website, the facility “serves families experiencing exceptional difficulty in the transfer of their children for the purpose of court ordered visitation. Participants are referred by the court and must have a court order specifying their participation.”
And while it may be the physical building itself that provides a safe environment for families in need of one, it’s the people who run the visitation center who are making all the difference for the most vulnerable in difficult family situations: the children.
And Supervised Visitation Coordinator April Hebert along with her staff said they are what it’s all about.
“We are child advocates,” Hebert said. “We care about our parents but it really is about the child. Our main concern is providing a safe, fun place for the child where they get to visit with the other parent because they deserve that.”
Hebert said despite the fact that the visitation center has only been open for about six weeks, she and her staff are already helping two families meet their court mandated responsibilities. Hebert said she was feeling very positive about the start of a facility that the community worked so hard to establish.
“I would say, overall, we are excited,” Hebert said. “We are helping families out. It could be more but we can’t control that. I’m very confident that things will pick up. We are happy with what we have seen so far.”
One of the center’s monitors, Yvanna Pogue who recently graduated college with a degree in Sociology with a concentration in social work, said for her, the most rewarding part of working at the center was working with the kids.
“This has been a great experience,” Pogue said. “It’s my first experience with this type of work. We have to realize that it is all about the child. The most rewarding part (of the job) is seeing the smile on a child’s face.”
Hebert said, in the future, she plans on reaching out to the community including other parishes to inform them of the opportunity posed by the Chez Hope Visitation Center.
“I think it’s all about awareness,” Hebert said. “I’m very confident that we are going to grow.”