Ribbon Cut On ​‘r kids Resiliency Center

There’s a wall hanging in the entrance hall of the new Resiliency Center, a reconnection agency on Dixwell Avenue that opened as part of ​‘r kids Family Center with a recent ribbon-cutting. 

It’s headed: ​“How to Really Love a Child.” 

“Be there,” that wall hanging, by Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy, known by her pen name SARK, reads. ​“Say yes as often as possible. Let them bang on pots and pans… If they’re unlovable, love yourself. Realize how important it is to be a child… Read books out loud with joy. Invent pleasures together. Remember how really small they are.”

In 1996, Randi Rubin Rodriguez and her husband Sergio Rodriguez co-founded ​‘r kids, an organization formed to fill existing gaps in child welfare services for children and families impacted by mental health, substance abuse, and family violence. Its mission: permanency, safety, and stability for vulnerable children and their families.

In September 2000, the ​‘r kids Family Center opened on Winchester Avenue as a place for parents and families to meet with the children who had been removed from their care and provide the guidance and support to reunify them. 

The center found its permanent home three years later, in a one-story structure built on a narrow lot just north of where Dixwell Avenue meets Goffe and Whalley. Over the next two decades, it flourished, boasting an 85 percent to 95 percent reunification rate among the hundreds of families referred to them by the state Department of Children & Families (DCF), as well as offering a full range of adoption services, including home study and license approval for both domestic and international adoptions. It also outgrew its space.

On Nov. 22, a group of roughly 30 gathered on that 45 Dixwell Ave. site to mark the $5 million, 11,000 square-foot expansion of the facility. The new Resiliency Center, the first of its kind in the state, is a multi-generational trauma-informed program with a state-licensed therapeutic childcare component for up to 16 infants and toddlers under the age of three who are at risk of removal or already removed by the DCF. It includes a licensed day care, meeting rooms for families and children, and a licensed food pantry on the first floor.

National Zero-Three, a federally funded organization, provided the seed money for programming. The Resiliency Center is supported this year by Congressionally-approved funding through the efforts and advocacy of U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal.

“Statistics have shown that in the U.S. every seven minutes a baby or a toddler is removed from their family due to alleged maltreatment, abuse, or neglect,” said Lorraine Rogers, director of the center, as she stood among cribs, a wooden boat, and a small rocking chair in the spacious, brightly lit classroom. ​“We are committed to empowering those families, who often are facing economic insecurities, extreme stress, and trauma, with the tools and support they need on their journeys.” 

She said the new emphasis on infants and toddlers is rooted in maintaining the bond between parents and children during their formative years — birth to age 3 — as part of the safe babies model, which is based on early childhood education findings that children who live in safe and supportive homes have the best chance for healthy development throughout their lives. 

That’s where the newly licensed therapeutic day care center comes in. ​“We have babies and toddlers on site up to seven or eight hours a day,” Rogers said. The observation room, where parents, behind a two-way mirror, can initially follow interactions between the teaching staff and their child, and then progress to practicing what they learn with their kids means, she said, ​“parents and children can do the work at the same site.”

Rubin Rodriguez — who retired in June, and who was reached by phone for an interview and was not at the ribbon cutting — cited a study from the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven showing that 70 percent of the center’s birth families had grown up in the child welfare system. ​“What we’re really about is not the physical teaching but supporting and healing people, parents, from their own trauma experiences,” she said. ​“It’s never been a question of parents not loving their children. It’s about giving them the tools to be successful parents.”

Lou Mangini, congressional aide to U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, lauded the impact of the ​‘r kids Family Center in the Greater New Haven area. ​“From its inception, it has provided a place where families can come together and get the resources and help they need to provide every child with a forever family,” he said.

Architect Craig Newick discussed the process of building upward from the narrow one-story structure on Dixwell by adding the second floor in a way to cantilever, or horizontally extend, over the existing driveway and yard on the north side. About its distinctive quality on Dixwell, ​“it’s not just some commercial building,” he said. ​“It’s kind of mute, but it also has this incredible presence.”

For Rodriguez, it seems, that description also sums up the 26 years of the center’s existence. ​“Prior to ​‘r kids being in New Haven, no one talked about the needs of children in foster care,” she said. ​“It wasn’t an issue. But it is. You remove an infant from a parent. That’s very, very traumatic for both. So the work becomes the key.”

“This is about the next generation,” she said, acknowledging the ongoing support of U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, DCF Commissioner Jody Hill-Lilly, and Commissioner Beth Bye of the state Office of Early Childhood, as well as the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven. 

“But even before that, there’s nothing more important than providing safe, secure, and loving homes for our children,” she said. ​“That’s everything.”