Small Agency Manages to Touch Many Lives : Social services: Interface provides therapy, crisis-intervention and advice to one in seven county residents.

For all the help it gives, Ventura County’s most far-ranging and influential social service agency seems impossibly small.

Yet with only six offices and a full-time staff of 63, Interface Children, Family Services of Ventura County has managed to touch the lives of one in seven county residents in the past fiscal year.

With an annual budget of just over $2 million and an army of 750 volunteers, officials at the nonprofit agency say Interface provided therapy, advice and crisis-intervention to more than 103,000 people countywide from July, 1993, to June, 1994.

Doctors, judges and social workers call Interface a vital safety net that backs up the increasingly overworked county public welfare agencies.

And as congressional cuts to social services trickle down to Ventura County, Interface’s 19 social programs will only become more crucial to mending the county’s ever-fraying social fabric, officials said.

“Our population has more problems than the other six out of seven people think it has,” said Richard Shaw of the county’s Public Social Service Agency.

“Without someplace like Interface, we couldn’t handle the number of problems that we have,” said Shaw, who often sends abused children and quarreling or abusive parents to Interface counselors. “And some of these problems would escalate into terrible things happening.”

Child abuse, domestic violence, medical neglect, juvenile delinquency, schoolyard fights--Interface workers try to attack the root causes of each and even intervene when violence threatens to erupt.

The Cool Home program for teen-age runaways and problem youths, begun in 1976, is one of Interface’s oldest and most successful services.

Like 25 other Cool Home residences, Carol Keller’s spare bedroom is always open to youths who need to escape squabbling or abusive families and are referred to her by Interface or county probation workers.

“It’s a place to put the kid so they don’t have to go to Juvenile Hall,” said Keller, who figures she has housed about 100 Cool Home kids since 1990.

The troubled teen-agers join her family for five or six days, going to movies, dinners and church, and sometimes playing basketball with her husband behind their Agoura Hills home, she said. During the day, the teen-agers study school lessons and talk with an Interface therapist to try to sort out their family troubles.

“They’re usually very grateful to be there, they’re very glad to be out of their house, and they’re glad that someone cares enough about them to give them a place to stay,” Keller said.

Interface also sends therapists from its Project Genesis into troubled homes, where probation and mental health workers have warned quarreling families to undergo therapy or risk losing custody of their kids.

Staff therapist Pam Chapman said nine out of 10 families who receive six weeks of therapy through Genesis learn to begin managing their conflicts and avoid losing their children.

Absent fathers, working mothers and medical problems such as attention-deficit disorder often lead to problem children, and the single parents are often glad to get help from Interface, Chapman said.

“I think when we leave, it’s not perfect by any means, but they have a better sense of dealing with each other,” Chapman said. “Therapy isn’t such a bad word any more. Most of the families I go into are real happy that there’s someone that will come in and objectively look around and help them out.”

Interface therapists also work with troubled children referred through the agency’s hot line.

Judi Hoyt, 11, of Thousand Oaks said she began punching things five years ago because she was angry her father had left home. She had even punched a hole in a wall. Her mother took her to Interface.

After a few sessions of stony silence, Judi said, she started to loosen up and talk about her father’s disappearance.

“I kind of felt safe around my therapist,” Judi said. “I didn’t really want to deal with it at first, but she kind of like brung it out of me piece by piece, like getting a knot out of a hair.”

When her father suddenly reappeared this year and mistook Judi’s younger half-sister for her, she went back to therapy to deal with her new anger.

“She does have a good sense of self-esteem--I wanted to make sure she stayed that way,” said her mother, Beth Arnold, a county social worker. “Having been a kid myself at one time, I knew it would have been helpful to have someone (impartial) to talk to.”

Interface therapists also work with parents who abuse or neglect their children, and the agency runs a shelter in east Ventura County for battered women and children.

There are even therapy groups for batterers and abusers, embracing 180 clients countywide, 10% of whom are women.

New abuse laws require the courts to send batterers through 32 weekly therapy sessions with agencies such as Interface or the Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence. There, they learn to understand and control their violent tendencies.

“We have gotten some who are just not going to change,” said Supervising Probation Officer Joan Splinter, whose department works closely with Interface. “But some victims report to us that the counseling has really made a difference in the relationship.”

Ventura County’s Children’s Protective Services also relies heavily on Interface, and the two agencies often refer cases to each other, said Richard Shaw, who coordinates the services for the county.

“Most people, even if they’re good parents, have times when life is hard, and they may lose it on occasion with their kids,” Shaw said. “They’re more likely to open up to an agency like (Interface) than to a big government agency.”

But Interface’s programs go far beyond dealing with troubled families.

Through Interface workers, foster children learn how to become self-sufficient adults. Schoolchildren learn how to resolve conflicts without fighting. Stressed parents get relief from social workers trained to baby-sit emotionally disturbed children.

And children of poor parents receive free medical treatment from volunteer doctors and dentists.

Camarillo dentist Mark Lisagor is just one of more than 350 of these medical volunteers.

“We see all kinds of decay, they’re not eating very well because of the discomfort or infection, there’s not very much in the way of evidence of hygiene or home care,” Lisagor said. “The first time we see them may be the morning after they’ve been up all night with a 103-degree fever and pain from an abscessed tooth. These kids are apt to be more fragile.”

Lisagor said the charity work “fires me up. . . . You know you have affected the child’s life in a big way.”

Poverty, gangs, drugs and the fracturing of traditional two-parent families tear away at a family’s ability to stay whole and healthy, said Marcos Vargas, who runs another of Ventura County’s largest social service agencies.

“I think there’s tremendous changes in our economy and our society that have created greater pressure on the average citizen,” said Vargas, executive director of El Concilio del Condado de Ventura. “Things that are now becoming the norm are situations we didn’t see many years back. They place a great deal of pressure on individuals, and I think that’s why more and more are seeking out counseling services.”

Even the strongest families suffer setbacks, said Charles Watson, Interface’s executive director.

“We believe families should have whatever assistance they need to stay together and to have productive and healthy lives,” Watson said. “All of us have little bumps in our life, and sometimes all these bumps are easy to handle and sometimes they are not.”

And sometimes bumps are big enough to rattle people’s ability to work.

Five Ventura County companies, including Procter & Gamble of Oxnard, refer employees with family or substance abuse problems to Interface counselors in hopes of keeping their workplaces safe and productive.

“Eventually, they’re going to get themselves fired if you don’t help them,” said Laurel Burns, who manages health services at Procter & Gamble. “Or they’re going to get hurt, or there’s going to be all kinds of problems out on the line.”

One worker, who asked not to be named, said she had been harboring anger at her husband for an affair he had 15 years ago. The 45-year-old technician said the depression made her feel “like I was going to go nuts here.”

Interface counselors helped her work through the anger, and now she recommends counseling to any co-worker she believes might need help.

“I let them know it has nothing to do with being nuts or not being able to handle their life,” she said. “Everybody at some time needs a little bit of help to cope.”

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FYI

Interface operates a toll-free crisis hot line 24 hours a day at 1-800-339-9597. Interface also operates Help-Line, a toll-free 24-hour referral service that gets callers in touch with social service agencies that can help them. The Help-Line number is 1-800-556-6607. Spanish-speaking staff members are available from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, and a 24-hour TDD line for the hearing-impaired is available at 805-496-4866.