Phyllis Horvath: Kinderhaven executive director

SANDPOINT — The stories are horrifying: Children who have never had a meal cooked for them by their parents. Kids who can barely speak because they have been virtually ignored since birth. And those stories are nothing compared with the ones of serial sexual abuse, sometimes involving every child in a family.

In 1996, Marsha Ogilvie — a Sandpoint businesswoman, city council member, mayor and foster child herself — rented a small house to provide shelter for these kids when Health and Welfare removed them from danger. Though Marsha has passed, her vision lives on in the work of people such as executive director Phyllis Horvath, as well as the staff and board members of Kinderhaven.

In 2006, Horvath moved to Bonner County from Sitka, Alaska, where she worked as a clinical therapist. Within a year, she and the emergency shelter had found one another and she brought her career background to bear in helping children in this unique setting. At the end of this year, she will hand the wheel over to Jennifer Plummer, a licensed social worker who Horvath selected and trained for the position of executive director.

How would you describe Kinderhaven?

Kinderhaven is an emergency shelter for abused and neglected children who have been removed from their homes for their own safety. The entities that remove them would be Health & Welfare and, sometimes, the police are there.

Oftentimes, people think Kinderhaven is the one removing the children, but we’re not doing that. That’s a decision made by Health & Welfare Child Protection Services when children’s lives are in danger. It takes a lot for them to reach that decision.

Traditionally, wouldn’t these same children be placed in foster homes?

Traditionally, they would. We don’t have a lot of foster homes in this area. Our primary service area would be Bonner and Boundary counties — that’s where most of our kids come from. And not all foster homes are willing to take sibling groups. If we have four, five or six children from the same home, nobody wants to separate them, because they’re already going through a very traumatic time of being removed from their parents. When they bring them to Kinderhaven, they can stay together.

If there were more foster homes available, would those children be split up?

Right. And they might not necessarily be in the same areas. It might be that one went to one county and one went to another county. That’s one of the last things that Health & Welfare wants to do and it’s definitely not good for the kids.

Given the population you serve, staffing must be a big deal – Kinderhaven is a 24/7 operation, isn’t it?

It is 24/7 and staffing is always a challenge, because we’re asking employees to come and stay overnight – in some cases, leaving their own home and their own to children – and sometimes we’re asking them to do that at a moment’s notice. People give up a lot to work at Kinderhaven. It’s a ‘heart thing’ that they’re doing, so they also get a lot from being able to help the kids.

What does the job entail?

It’s not an easy job. It’s not just coming in, cooking for the children, cleaning the house and making sure that they get off to school. All of those things are important, but we ask our staff to take a therapeutic, clinical approach – we want every single thing we do with the children to have a therapeutic value for them, so that they get a different experience of having adults care for them.

In the course of a day, what sorts of activities would have therapeutic value?

For people who live in normal situations, a lot of them would seem like everyday activities. For example, cooking breakfast for a child. We all do that, right? It’s not a big deal. But if a child has never had food cooked for them and here they have an adult fixing them a meal, then what that adult is saying to the child, without words, is: ‘You are important to me.’ Things that are considered ordinary really are sending a subliminal message to the children.

It’s also lots and lots of nurturing. Every opportunity we have, we let the kids know we love them and we value them. We praise them, but it’s praise with authenticity, not meaningless praise. They get recognized; they get attention.

How bad does it get for these kids before they are brought to Kinderhaven?

(Long pause) It’s very bad. Sometimes, it’s difficult to allow oneself to think about it, because of what we encounter, to one degree or another, with all of our children. It could be as bad as living in filth, wearing clothes that are always dirty and living in a home where there is feces on the floor and there’s no food in the house.

Another example would be a sibling group of three, four or five kids, and all of them have been abused, either sexually or physically. We see more sexual abuse than physical abuse. Certainly, we see kids who are hit by their parents, but that’s not typical. It’s the underlying sexual and emotional abuse that is harder to discover.

We’ve had younger children who come with speech difficulties, because no one has spoken to them – you know, the way we do with little babies all the time? They’ve been left alone with no interaction, so they haven’t been able to develop their speech. We had one parent who would not allow the child to have enough food, so the child was slowly being starved to death. It wasn’t due to poverty, it was as a punishment.

What’s really sad is the parents themselves usually come from families themselves where they were abused or neglected, where they had no oversight or nurturing, so they don’t know any better. And now it’s passed on.

So, just as there is generational poverty, there is generational abuse?

Oh, man. You would be shocked at what gets passed down from generation to generation. And the way that it stops is when somebody has an opportunity to interact with another adult and finds out that not everybody is going to hit him or her, or use them for sex or refuse to feed them. That’s when it begins to stop.

It’s a jarring picture. Do a lot of these kids share that kind of awful history when they are brought to Kinderhaven?

Their stories may be different, but there’s a certain profile that just about every child has. One of the elements is that the child comes in feeling responsible. They think they’re there because they must have done something bad. They’re ashamed, they’re angry and they do not trust adults at all. Most of them have a lot of anxiety, understandably.

We can tell, right away, if coming to Kinderhaven is the first time they’ve been around adults who they can rely on and who treat them with respect. It doesn’t take a lot to help a child begin to balance a little bit or to be a little bit more grounded. I always let staff know that it just takes one person to make a difference in a child’s life.

So a child comes to Kinderhaven in the throes of crisis and you begin to engender trust and start the healing process. But what happens when they have to leave the shelter? Are you helpless at that point?

Most often, parents are not allowed to see the kids right away. Social workers start working with the parents to determine what happened and what the parents have to do to get the children back and keep them safe. At some point, depending on the parents and whether they are being respectful and appropriate, we can arrange for them to have a family visit.

We never say anything bad about the parents, no matter what our feelings might be, because that’s a very special bond that they have. We try to facilitate a way for them to find their way back to one another. If the social worker decides that it’s never going to be safe for them to go back, we’ll help them make that transition.

You’re in your 20th year of operation – how many kids have been helped by Kinderhaven?

At least 1,500. There wasn’t a lot of heavy duty record-keeping early on, but at least 1,500. We don’t cast a wide net, but we cast a very deep net. At any one time, we might have 10 children and we might have them for six months.

We have them long enough to make a change. That’s what we’re interested in – helping to heal wounds and help them begin to change their lives.

Kinderhaven has a reputation for being a big part of the broader, nurturing community for kids. Has that always been a part of the charter?

I think that evolved after I got there. One of the reasons I was hired was to bring a clinical aspect to it, because that was one thing that was lacking. Kinderhaven was doing a great job of taking care of basic needs and making sure kids were getting to school, but it didn’t have that therapeutic base. So, when I came in, that was one of the things I wanted to do.

Part of creating normality for children and healing their wounds is making sure they are part of the community and that they have lives.

We’re always looking for partnerships and we stay in very close contact with the schools for that very reason. It’s like wrapping everybody’s arms around these children and that’s one of the things that’s so great about this community, is that they step up to it.

How is Kinderhaven funded and supported?

In terms of funding, 86 percent of our funding comes from the local community. There’s a small stipend – about 14 percent – that comes from Health & Welfare, which is the same payment that a foster parent would get.

Of that 86 percent, most of it comes from individuals and businesses who are local. But we have a couple who lives out in Washington, who, for the last six years, has always donated to Kinderhaven through their company. I’ve never met them and I don’t even know how they heard about us. It’s like magic. People seem to love to talk about Kinderhaven.

We’re approaching the season where Kinderhaven’s one, big fundraiser takes place – the Festival of Trees. How does it impact your annual budget?

It provides us with anywhere from half to two-thirds of our operating expenses. We’re very reliant on it. We never want to give it up, because it’s part of the community now.

This year, we’re going to be out at the Bonner County Fairgrounds, which is brand new for us. But, as successful as that event is, we always start out the year with not enough money. As we work our way through the year, voluntary donations come in and we end up OK.

Is it tough to keep a positive outlook on life when what you see is so abysmally sad?

It is tough. It’s a challenge. For those of us who live in that kind of semi-normal range, it’s a veneer. And beneath that veneer, we can’t even begin to imagine what goes on. It’s like something you would read in a book, but it’s real. Sometimes I just shake my head, because there are no words. You are blown away by what has happened to these children.

We had one girl who, every night, had night terrors. She was screaming, ‘No! No! Get away! Leave me alone!’ And we know what that means. It was not just a nightmare. Our heart breaks every day.

At the same time, we look at them when they’re laughing and they’ve forgotten for a while – they’re being children again. We’ve got some teens girls and when they giggle, it’s like wind chimes. We take our joy from that.

You’ve been preparing Jennifer Plummer to take your post. What qualities were you looking for in your successor?

I wanted somebody who had the kind of intrinsic qualities that one cannot train. Somebody who has heart, is extremely intelligent, well organized, professional and a team player. I wanted someone who has energy – younger than I. And I wanted someone who had experience with and a passion for working with kids – that was paramount.

You can’t really talk about Kinderhaven without at least touching on the importance of its founder, Marsha Ogilvie. Does the organization still reflect her vision?

When I started working in 2007, Marsha stepped down one board meeting later, so I only got to meet her at one board meeting. But she would call me on the phone and was always interested in what was going on. She was very involved in the Festival of Trees and wanted to help us make it the best possible event. She was very creative and had more ideas in her head than just about anybody that I ever knew. She was a whirlwind.

We have a Marsha Corner at Kinderhaven, with some pictures of her, plus some pieces of artwork she had in her office when she was the mayor (of Sandpoint). Even though she turned the board over to other people, she never stopped being part of Kinderhaven.

What fuels your passion for this work?

One of the reasons I’m so passionate about it is that my mother was abused as a child. This was back in the ‘20s and early ‘30s in Texas and they had no place for children to turn to. There were some hideous things that happened to her that she held inside. She never got to have that experience of having some adults who were a good influence on her.

In her early 60s, she committed suicide. When that happened, I decided I wanted to become a therapist, because I didn’t want anyone else I knew to do something like that. It just made me realize I wanted to do some work that came more from the heart than the head. And in a different way, she’s always with me, because, when I see a lot of the children, I think of her and what she didn’t get.

It sounds like Kinderhaven is in the business of making this a better world.

We’re trying. If you think of throwing a stone into a pond, there are all these ripples that come out. If we can give that one child a different experience where they realize, ‘I can trust adults’ or ‘This is what it’s like to have integrity,’ then that child starts to make friends differently.

I always think of those ripples expanding out into the community. When we have healthier kids, the community gets healthier.

For more information on Kinderhaven, visit online at: www.kinderhavensandpoint.com