Her Business Is Booming--and That’s Not Good : Social services: The surge in clients at a family assistance agency is blamed on the recession. It poses a big challenge for the new director.
The recession has been good for business at Nancy Tallerino’s agency--and that’s a problem.
Tallerino is the new executive director of Family Service of Santa Monica, the venerable social service agency that provides counseling and other assistance to families and individuals on issues ranging from social and economic stress to child abuse.
The recession, Tallerino said, has brought a flood of clients to her office, most seeking help in coping with family or other problems that in many cases have been aggravated by a financial squeeze.
“People . . . are feeling more stress, they don’t know where to turn,” Tallerino said.
Besides facing a surge in clients, Tallerino has been contending with other challenges during her first four months at the helm of the agency.
In a month, Family Service will move into new quarters for the first time in half a century. Meanwhile, with the aid of her staff of 12 social workers, Tallerino is trying to develop new services and approaches to counseling families and abused or neglected children. Among the top priorities are a pioneer program involving grandparents and the establishment of a therapeutic day-care center.
Tallerino began her focus on children and family during a part-time job at County-USC Medical Center, where she worked for seven years during high school and while earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work at USC.
“I was raised in Arcadia. It was a nice little suburban community, where I just wasn’t exposed to what I was exposed to at (County-USC),” she said. “It really gave me insight into a lot of different cultures and exposed me to another side of life that I’d been protected from.”
As a social worker at MacLaren Children’s Center, she made discoveries that led to original research on the extent of child abuse in Los Angeles County. In that year alone, she worked with 232 children who had been molested--this at a time when little was known about the extent of sexual abuse of children younger than 12.
“I remember hearing stories from kids, particularly sexually abused young children, and thinking to myself, ‘These kids have more experience than I have,’ ” Tallerino said. She particularly remembers the case of a 5-year-old who had been sexually abused, had witnessed a murder and was being raised primarily by her 8-year-old brother.
Tallerino began working with the child, who was outwardly hostile. After about nine months of play therapy, where the two used dolls to re-enact the child’s haunting experiences, the 5-year-old was able to be placed in a foster home.
Tallerino said that although her specialty lies with such extreme cases, Family Service deals with a much broader spectrum of issues, as its clientele comes from a broad geographic and economic range. Most clients come from Santa Monica and nearby areas of Los Angeles, although some seek out the agency from considerably greater distances.
But Tallerino said she can identify a problem unique to the Westside population.
“I think there is a reluctance to identify children as being at risk in this community, because the community is seen as a fairly affluent, nice, middle-class community,” she said. “For example, there are numerous people coming into St. John’s Hospital with babies who show prenatal exposure to drugs.
“We want to think that it’s only one kind of community that has these problems--and it’s just not true.”
One of Tallerino’s new programs is designed to help grandparents, who have been thrust into a parenting role, bridge the gap spanning two generations.
“These are parents who have raised their own children and are now finding they are faced with the challenges of parenting again because their children have been unable, for various reasons such as drug use, or economically based reasons, to parent,” she said.
“Kids are faced with more challenges in school now than they were in another time, so when kids come home with these problems, how does this generation (the grandparents) respond to them?”
Tallerino said her support group is designed to acquaint grandparents with some of the problems faced by children in the 1990s.
A long-term goal of Tallerino’s is to establish a therapeutic day-care center whose primary purpose would be to help children who have not functioned well in conventional day-care programs.
Ideally, she says, it would have an in-house counselor and a very low teacher-student ratio. Tallerino said she would like the agency’s old office, which has been its headquarters since 1936, razed to make way for such a facility. That way, she said, she could “slip over to (it) during lunchtime to play with the kids.” The project is still in the discussion phase.
The agency will move in March from that old office, a 59-year-old clapboard house, to a new pink and gray structure next door that cost $750,000. Tallerino said the new facility was funded almost entirely by private gifts from the community, a flow of donations that has held up reasonably well through the recession.
Founded in 1925, Family Service, a private, nonprofit agency, has tried all along to tailor its programs to the problems at hand, Tallerino said. During the Depression, for example, the agency created a mattress shop to provide work for the unemployed. During World War II, it provided child care for defense workers. It began single-parent counseling in the 1970s and went to high school campuses to provide counseling for teen-agers in the 1980s.
The emphasis today, Tallerino said, is on prevention. Through such things as parenting classes and stress management seminars, the goal is to prevent family dysfunction before it occurs.
The agency provides counseling in Spanish and English on a sliding scale, ranging from $5 to $90 an hour, depending on income, Tallerino said. It deals with about 500 cases each year.
Family Service of Santa Monica is at 1539 Euclid St., Santa Monica, 90404. Call (310) 451-9747.
