Message From Our Executive Director
Welcome to the Westside Children’s Center website. As you’ll see when you browse, we provide a wide range of programs and participate in a series of collaborations. All of these are designed to work together to help the children in our community reach their optimal development in stable loving families.
WCC started out as a foster family agency, focusing on very young children removed from their homes. Over the last twenty years, foster care has remained a core program. We’ve also realized more and more the importance of strengthening and supporting families before they run into the kind of trouble that leads to foster care.
Recently, in recognition of this shift towards prevention, we adopted four major goals for the Agency. These include: helping children maximize their potential; helping families thrive; helping providers maximize their potential to strengthen families; and contributing to the community-building process.
We are very proud of our efforts to meet these goals with well-coordinated services that reach out to the community and build on families’ strengths. This level of quality, though, is not cheap. So we are also very proud to have the support of our Board and the two groups, the Auxiliary and the Big Hearts Club, which put on our major annual events, the Children’s Arts Festival and the Cami Markman Memorial Big Hearts Lunch.
I hope you will take the time to explore our website and then to get involved.
Richard Cohen, Ph.D.
Executive Director
