Loved Ones Get Help to Heal Problems at Home

Kelsey was fighting with her stepdad -- again -- when she first thought about running away.

Once a solid student, the 15-year-old was close to flunking out of her Ventura high school. She had fallen in with the wrong crowd and was trying drugs. Now she was mad at her parents, this time over her stepfather’s insistence that she keep a midnight curfew.

Before slipping out a window, though, Kelsey talked to a high school counselor. That turned out to be a good move.

The counselor referred her to Interface Children Family Services, a Ventura County agency that runs a temporary foster care program called Cool Homes. Cool Homes gives teens a place to stay for a few days when things get bad at home.

After three days apart, Kelsey and her parents had cooler heads and were ready to talk again. Interface counselors met with them to help navigate the land mines that threatened to tear their relationship apart.

Kelsey, now 19, calls it a turning point. “I made a decision to change my life, and I got it back together eventually,” she said.

Follow-up counseling helped her confront the real source of her turmoil -- the separation and eventual divorce of her parents, Kelsey said. “When I was thinking about running away, it felt like freedom,” said Kelsey, now a receptionist. “It scares me that I had those thoughts.”

Keeping kids off the streets is a primary goal of Cool Homes, said Interface chief program officer Terry Miller. Counselors teach parents and teens how to get through the awkward years with a minimum of damage, she said. And it’s free -- important to families like Kelsey’s.

Her mother suffers from mental illness, and her stepfather hauls trash bins for a living. They never could have afforded professional help, she said.

Cool Homes was one of the first programs Interface offered when it formed in 1973, Miller said. Now the private, nonprofit organization operates more than 80 services, helping families affected by child abuse, domestic violence and poverty.

A federal grant allows Interface to place about 120 teenagers a year at Cool Homes, Miller said. The program, which received $5,000 from the Times Holiday Campaign, could expand if Interface had more funding, she said. Recipients must wait a year before they can be eligible again for Holiday Campaign grants.

The annual Holiday Campaign was established in 2000 and is a part of the Los Angeles Times Family Fund, a fund of the McCormick Tribune Foundation. The foundation matches the first $700,000 raised at 50 cents on the dollar, and the foundation and The Times absorb all administrative costs.

*

HOW TO GIVE

Donations (checks or money orders) supporting the Los Angeles Times Holiday Campaign should be sent to: L.A. Times Holiday Campaign, File# 56986, Los Angeles, CA 90074-6986.

Please do not send cash. Credit card donations can be made on the Web site: www.latimes.com/holidaycampaign.

All donations are tax-deductible. Contributions of $25 or more will be acknowledged in The Times unless a donor requests otherwise. Acknowledgment cannot be guaranteed for donations received after Dec. 18. For more information about the Holiday Campaign, call (800) LATIMES, ext. 75771.