Children and Family First receive large grant, expansions on the way

Children and Families First is a service in Delaware that helps children facing adversity and their families improve their livelihood through counseling. They have received more than two- hundred thousand dollars in grant money from Highmark Delaware.

Dr. Julian Mulen says, “We are extremely excited and quite frankly honored to be able to be in a position to serve more families.”

The grant will allow Children and Families First, or CFF to hire two additional full-time therapists, certify intensive outpatient treatment counselors in cognitive behavioral therapy, and train their staff in dialectical behavioral therapy.

CFF work with families who’s children are between the ages of ten and eighteen and are struggling with their child facing things like behavioral issues, truancy, substance abuse and incarceration. Their functional therapy behavioral program manager Brenda Smith says the CFF Sussex County office has a waiting list of about twenty- five families, so this grant will be a big help.

Smith continues, “I feel like we do a top job right now, but it will give us the ability to able to train more therapists in different models of therapy. It will give the community an array of services to better suit whoever we’re servicing.”