Children’s Home Society and Childhaven merge to form ‘Akin,’ which will continue to offer early learning services and more

With 100 years of Spokane history, a statewide nonprofit that shifted away from adoptions to child and family services has a new name: Akin.

Founded in 1896, it was Washington Children’s Home Finding Society and then Children’s Home Society of Washington. Known here for 70 years as the Galland Hall on the South Hill, the region’s branch moved in 2004 to the Galland-Ashlock Family Resource Center in Spokane Valley.

The Akin name nods to kin or kinship care among families and emerges from a Jan. 1 statewide merger with Childhaven, another early 1900s nonprofit launched in Seattle to help single parents with day care. Childhaven later transitioned to offering childhood well-being programs.

Nick Flett, Akin Spokane regional director, said the moniker better suits modern services aimed at keeping families together. In Spokane, that’s child and family counseling, early learning and developmental support for infants to young kids, plus parent education and other family programs.

“The most important thing for families to know is everything we’re doing now is staying the same – we’re not going to discontinue services or radically change,” Flett said.

“What we will see over the next few years is some enhancement of what we’re doing. We have a little care closet, Phase 1, that will go through a couple more phases in growing as a resource for families needing diapers, wipes, clothing and menstrual products.

“Also, you can come here in a few years and be able to meet with a family navigator who might help you more directly connect with other resources.”

When phased in, those family navigators will sit down with families to find wider community assistance aid, perhaps housing support or help paying utilities and rent.

The overall goals are to strengthen relationships between parents and kids – especially in early years – with support physically and emotionally. Two pillars are family behavioral health and early learning that involves parents and children from the prenatal stage to entering kindergarten.

Akin’s Spokane-area child and family counseling program sees “upward of about 600 kids per year,” Flett said. Meanwhile, local early learning programs offer home visits for about 150 to 200 families a year.

For Spokane County, Akin has 13 therapists for individual outpatient therapy and some group therapy, Flett said. Its therapists are at the Galland-Ashlock center and two partner sites, Northeast Community Center and an office at 8727 Highway 2. The Valley center has art therapy and a summer group that helps children improve social skills.

“We’re working with kids from a variety of backgrounds and needs, through the Apple Health program, which is Medicaid in Washington, and a little bit of commercial insurance,” Flett said. “It’s really focused on helping to support the entire family. There is a lot of demand.”

For early learning, nine home visitors travel to homes in the county to work with parents on federal Head Start early learning skills. The Spokane branch also has a separate program, Parents as Teachers, an evidence-based home visiting model to guide parents through child development stages.

Akin locally partners with two privately owned childcare sites: Parkview Early Learning Center and Lilac City Early Learning Center. Akin contracts with those sites and provides funding via Head Start federal dollars to turn some spaces into early Head Start classrooms with lower teacher-to-child ratios, Flett said.

Akin also provides staff at those centers to support families, including a family navigator and a mental health consultant to help with children’s social-emotional development and other family mental health needs.

“We also have a health coordinator who works to ensure the children’s health needs are met at the center, and the family has access to basic health needs, so they’re signed up for insurance and have a medical home.”

Also, Akin here supports a Parents for Parents service, under a subcontract to be run by the Health and Justice Recovery Alliance. Parents entering the child welfare system can be mentored by peers who previously had children in foster care and successfully reunited with them.

About 30 years ago, Children’s Home Society began moving away from adoptions and foster programs toward overall family and child well-being, Akin CEO Dave Newell said.

“We ended our last adoption program about 2½ years ago, and we still have a small foster program in Wenatchee that we are working with the state to phase out, so when that foster care program ends, we will be pretty much 100% in the early intervention, child well-being space.

“We already are one of the largest child and family providers in Spokane. One of the strengths we’re really excited about from the Childhaven merger is they have, in particular, specialized in infant mental health. We expect that to be implemented on a deeper scale.”

Infant mental health programs work with the parent or caregiver on early bonding and in meeting a child’s needs.

Flett said he’s glad about using a much shorter name in public talks.

“Our name for so long was so confusing, and as recent as a month ago, I’d get calls from folks who want to ask about orphans living here or to come and rock babies, because the name justifiably implied this must be a children’s home,” Flett said. “This new name will hopefully remove some confusion.”

He also gets approached at events by people in Spokane who were adopted through the nonprofit.

“We were still doing home studies and adoption support services I would say up to about 10 years ago locally,” he said. “We made a positive impact. Today, we’re trying to be preventative and have that intervention when we can have the most impact early to keep that family together.”