Welcome to Lund Family Center!
Annually serving more than 4,000 individuals throughout the State of Vermont, Lund Family Center is:
- Vermont’s oldest and largest private non-profit adoption agency
- An effective resource for teen pregnancy prevention
- Vermont’s only residential treatment program for pregnant and parenting young women and their children
- A leader in woman-focused substance abuse recovery services
- A Parent Child Center that delivers a continuum of services in the most accessible way possible to children and families throughout Chittenden County
Lund Family Center has a positive statewide impact on the lives of families. During the past 120 years, Lund has earned a national reputation. The organization has been the recipient of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Adoption Excellence Award, the March of Dimes Lifetime Achievement Award, and the GlaxoWellcome Child Health Recognition Award.
The past few years have been an extraordinary time for new beginnings at Lund Family Center. First and foremost, it was a momentous occasion for us to move back into our expanded and completely transformed residential building at 76 Glen Road in Burlington. While our roots at this site go back to 1890, we said goodbye to the 1960s maternity home building design and officially opened a new chapter by designing a space that meets the treatment needs of the families we are serving today and the families we plan to serve in the future. The new building enhances our ability to provide services to children and families. Our expanded capacity allows us to annually help create new beginnings for an additional 25 Vermont children and their families, allowing us to serve more than 80 children and their families each year. We are so grateful to all of you who helped make this very visible new beginning a reality.
Under this roof, I am delighted and heartened to see young women working so hard to create a new beginning for themselves and their children. They are receiving counseling and support to live a life that is not overshadowed by trauma, addiction, and pain, but rather experience a new beginning of hope and possibility. Over the past two years, we have increased the comprehensiveness of services to give families a stronger start. Most notably, in Fiscal Year 2008, Lund Family Center and the Department for Children and Families (DCF) began a collaborative partnership to increase family stability for children affected by parental substance abuse. Through this project, Lund Family Center and DCF are working to establish a practice of “frontloading” services and recognizing that substance abuse is often a contributing factor at the beginning of a child welfare investigation. This innovative project will serve as a model for the State of Vermont’s child welfare system.
In the past two years we celebrated the successes of 31 first generation college students and we helped place 58 individuals into apprenticeships, training jobs, or employment in the community so that they could build their resume and learn real-life work skills. As one of the designated parent child centers in the State of Vermont, Lund Family Center continues to have a strong focus on primary prevention services and early childhood services. Lund Family Center’s adoption program in partnership with the State of Vermont through Project Family successfully finalized the adoptions of 359 children who were in foster care. This groundbreaking work is getting children out of foster care and into a loving adoptive home more quickly and effectively than ever before. The result is that children who have been abused, neglected, or orphaned do not have to wait endlessly for a new beginning.
While we are excited and proud of our work, there is much more to be done. This year, while economics will be a challenge for all of us, the children and families we serve will experience these challenges the most. Now more than ever, we need to be there for Vermont’s children and their families. We know that when the economy falters, rates of substance abuse and child abuse soar. Help us to be sure that children thrive and that families get the help they need to prevent child abuse and neglect. Your unfaltering support even during the tough times will help us to be there to not only ensure new beginnings for children and families, but happy endings as well.
Thank you for your support,
Barbara Rachelson
Executive Director
PO Box 4009