Message From Our Executive Director, Margot R. Carlson, LMFT

Welcome to our new Web site! Join me now and on the following pages we can check out all of the human service programs that CSP is currently providing. You should note that CSP was founded in 1972 and this Agency is one of longest standing non-profits in Orange County. We have evolved along a continuum of care that has never deviated from the original mission. We provide services to at risk youth in order to divert them from the Juvenile Justice System and we assist victims of crime as they are processed through the Criminal Justice System. Last year alone the Agency served over 106,000 clients.

I have long repeated myself to community members and to our generous donors that “Orange County is a much more humane place to live because of the services that are provided by CSP.” These services are not just well intentioned grass root efforts but fully fledged professional best practice interventions delivered by trained and supervised staff. Our employees numbering well over two hundred and fifty are carefully screened and only chosen after intensive interviewing by at least two levels of management.

There are significant changes in the profiles of the clients we serve today as contrasted with the very first clients. When we began working with runaway and abused adolescents in the 70’s there was very little drug use among our Diversion and Shelter clients and no, yes I said no youth gangs in Orange County. At least there were no gangs that any City Administrators would admit to knowing. Now a fair percentage of the youths claim gang membership or association and a high percentage of the youngsters we serve have used or are experimenting with much heavier drugs. In many cases the teenagers are self medicating with alcohol and/or drugs and many of them are combining both substances.

It is our commitment at the Shelter to reunify the children and their parents wherever possible. However, raising children in today’s society is loaded with challenges. The parents that we are seeing at the Shelter are very involved with their own struggles; divorce, blended families, mental illness and financial pressures that drain their energy and the constancy necessary to raise children in the twenty first century.

In our Country, children’s causes first gained considerable attention during the Industrial Revolution. Migration and dislocation swept the country during the attendant transition from rural to urban and many families did not tolerate that relocation without disturbing consequences. At that time it was not considered seemly for women of any affluence to join the workforce but they could and did band together to do charitable work for the children. They raised money for orphanages, work houses and hospitals for the underprivileged. Their efforts were particularly directed toward children.

Eventually the organizations that these women volunteers founded morphed toward becoming more systematized. More and more they began to resemble non-profits as we know them today. Social problems had grown beyond the capability of strictly volunteer efforts and dedicated supporters were eventually forced to formalize programs with paid staff: first to handle abandoned children and then volunteers in juvenile courts further expanded into taking responsibility for troubled and delinquent youths.

Non-profits began to proliferate across the county and they were welcomed as a low cost alternative to governmental agencies dedicated to working with delinquent youth because governmental studies declared that locking youths up did not change their delinquent behaviors. There were too many social factors involved including dysfunction among families. Federal dollars were made available to successful bidders designed along the line of Youth Service Bureaus. At first the money was considered seed money with the idea that when a program became successful the clients and the communities that were served would find a way to pay for the services locally. The premise was sincerely believed and adopted by many government funders and corporate donors alike. So the funding itself was considered time limited. However the Federal contracts were usually directed toward the communities at or below the poverty level and the delinquency it was meant to irradiate was founded on much deeper and more pervasive social problems. These clients could barely provide for their own basic needs much less pay more than a modest minimum of the cost. The desired outcome for these adolescents was to counsel with them and to include their families whenever possible and keep the youths from further involvement with the Juvenile Justice System; finally keep them in school and connect them to other existing human resources. The premise of diverting these youngsters for services in the community rather than locking them up was good but the dollars for program support began to fade. Police departments began to pay for the programs with their own budget dollars and City Governments and County Agencies accelerated their efforts at grant making.

Along the way the non-profits expanded and hired more educated staff with greater capability of dealing with some very serious community problems. Child abuse and victim interventions, gang preventions services, short term adolescent shelter homes for crisis interventions and the most recently adopted human trafficking programs were all part of the original and continued service expansion.

In recent time a recession began and as it continues to grow there is less funding available for these well accepted programs. At the same time social problems continued to escalate as population expanded and more and more immigrants impacted social services. As a result of these funding pressures, County Collaboratives were born. The County began awarding contracts to non-profit programs in order to partner in social and mental health problem solutions and to relieve some of the extreme pressure on the Justice System. Non-profits and the services that they provide are now accepted as worthy partners in the attempt to improve the County’s safety and quality of life.

CSP has always been proactive in an attempt to keep pace with expanding demands for service. We now depend on dollars from the Federal Government, the State and the County, Foundations, United Way and our most treasured charitable donors to keep these valuable human services available. Join us in this effort to preserve the quality of life that we enjoy in Orange County. An adaption of an old adage was never truer than it is today. When you support CSP Programs to help others you are really helping yourself.