Struggling Children Get help from Gillis and Build-A-Bear’s Bear Hugs Foundation

Thanks to some very generous donors, Gillis has some new wheels!

Leawood Elementary Organizes "Groceries For Gillis" food drive.

Gillis thanks long time supporter Promotional Products Association of the Midwest.

Gillis announces the Andrew Nilges Scholarship Fund.

In the mid 1990s the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence was created to carefully examine and evaluate every program out there attempting to stop this ages old cycle of violence. Around the same time, the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta began a similar project looking for programs with proven results to end the cycle. The Office of the United States Surgeon General saw this problem as a health concern and that office too, commissioned an in-depth look at programs designed to get our society off of this violence merry-go-round.

All three of these rigorous studies found two programs that showed consistent and significant results over a long period of time. The first is Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care or MTFC. The second was a model called Functional Family Therapy. As a leader in social services for 139 years, Gillis can’t ignore programs that are proven to work.

FFT
Our new Functional Family Therapy (FFT) program focuses on teens involved or at-risk of becoming involved in the juvenile justice system. FFT is an empirically grounded, well-documented and successful family intervention and our new Gillis division, Intensive Family Counseling, is the only certified Functional Family Therapy (FFT) program site in the Kansas City metropolitan area.
     Models this good don’t come cheap, but Gillis made the commitment. We added the Multidimensional Foster Care Program and had it up and running by the end of February. Functional Family Therapy has been offered since 2003 through an agency called Intensive Family Counseling, but there was a risk that our community could lose this valuable service. Gillis will not let that happen. Last month we stepped up and agreed to a merger/acquisition with Intensive Family Counseling to insure the survival of this highly effective program. By the end of September, Functional Family Therapy will be fully integrated as a Gillis program. Under the auspices and direction of Gillis, Intensive Family Counseling will continue to offer their other programs as well. You can learn more about this excellent new division of Gillis at ifc-kc.org.
     After a century of responding to Kansas City’s problems, Gillis is proud to offer these new pro-active programs that focus on prevention and breaking the cycle.