High Profile: KAY PHILLIPS

The good news is that the Dorchester Children's Center has experienced growth and success every year since it was formed.

The bad news is that it is even needed.

The only children's advocacy center in Dorchester County, the center is operated by Children in Crisis. Its goal is to aid in the investigation and treatment of child abuse cases in a child-friendly environment.

Kay Phillips, 53, is the center's first full-time executive director.

"People in this business are asked all the time, 'How can you hear those stories?' " says Phillips. "It is very hard and can be sad and depressing. The way we deal with it is that we know we are helping. We are hopeful our services are life-altering."

The center works closely with the Department of Social Services, local law-enforcement agencies, the solicitor's office, mental health department and any other agency that has a stake in a child's welfare.

Phillips seems perfect for her job despite the circuitous route she took to get there.

Born in the former Baker Hospital and raised in Hanahan, she was 16 when she gave birth to a daughter, Angela.

"I wouldn't recommend it (being a teen mother), but I was so blessed," she says. "I have a wonderful daughter."

Over the next 25-plus years, she ran a couple of businesses and pursued first a master's degree and then a doctorate in social work from the University of South Carolina.

"I didn't know what I would wind up doing," she says. "My mother had gone back to school for a master's in social work. I knew I enjoyed working in business, but I just started rethinking things and knew that I wanted to do something that meant more.

"I'm a spiritual person, and I felt that I was supposed to be doing something different, something better with my life. The bottom line for my motivation was to simply begin to do what I felt God intended for me to do when he put me here."

'A good fit'

Three days before she defended her dissertation in 2001, her daughter, then the mother of an 8-year-old daughter, gave birth to premature twins, so Phillips decided to limit herself to part-time work, teaching at Charleston Southern University and counseling, so that she could help out her family.

A couple of years later, with the children older, Phillips felt it was time to start looking for full-time work.

She was in the same social circle as Summerville's first lady, Marlena Myers whose passion is Children in Crisis, which was formed in 1997 to build a children's advocacy center in Dorchester County.

After several years of work, the group's dream first was realized in 2003, when an advocacy center opened in retail space near Summerville's Main Street. It quickly outgrew the space and moved into a former medical office a few blocks away just over a year later.

In mid-2004, Phillips ran into Myers and learned that the center's part-time director was leaving and the center was looking for its first full-time director.

"We talked one day to see if we thought it would be a good fit," Phillips says.

With a strong business background and degrees in social work, Phillips was hired.

She spent most of her first year hiring staff and making sure everyone was properly trained while also seeing to it that the center provided services.

In 2006, after a fight for rezoning, the center landed at its present location in a former apartment building at 303 E. Richardson Ave.

"My first task was to develop the systems needed to make the agency work," she says. "I had to develop a business plan and implement that plan."

Assisted by the Dee Norton Lowcountry Children's Center in Charleston County, Children in Crisis helped 57 children between December 2003 and the end of 2004.

With its own full-time staff dedicated to providing services, the center saw 441 children in 2005.

"This was new for me and for the board," Phillips says. "We didn't really know what was waiting for us out there."

They soon found out as the number of clients served has grown each year. Last year, there were 752 children. This year, Phillips says, they expect to see about 900.

"We are proud of our progress and the number of children we've been able to help," she says. "We wouldn't have been able to do it without strong community support."

The building is designed to put children at ease during interviews, medical exams, mental health evaluations and follow-up treatment, with murals on the walls, comfortable furniture and toys.

One of the benefits of an advocacy center is that children have to tell their story only one time. A live video streams from interview rooms to nearby observation rooms, where other experts can watch and feed questions to the child's examiner via an earpiece. The whole session also is videotaped.

In addition to the center's therapists, the Medical University of South Carolina staffs an on-site exam room, and several local agencies, such as DSS and law enforcement, have employees anchored in the building.

The center does not serve as an emergency shelter.

Meeting a need

Like every nonprofit, there are always challenges. When it moved into its current location in 2006, some area residents worried about the traffic it would generate and opposed the rezoning.

On the positive side that year, the center received accreditation from the National Children's Alliance, and Dorchester voters approved a referendum that increased their taxes about $8 a year on a $200,000 house to help fund the center.

The tax increase brings in about half the center's annual operating budget of more than half a million dollars.

"When we needed money, the people decided to support us," Phillips says. "We never would have been able to meet the demand otherwise."

Phillips looks at the center as an investment in the future, believing that helping children now could keep them from becoming addicts or criminals in the future or end a cycle of abuse.

In the future, she hopes things will slow down at the center.

"We have experienced rapid growth," she says. "We have gone gangbusters for three years, and that has left us just trying to keep up, so we are looking for a chance to settle down."

Brenda Rindge can be reached at 937-5713 or brindge@postandcourier.com.