Corpus Christi (KIII News) — Family Counseling Services is just one of the 50 agencies that depend on your support to provide services to those in need in the Coastal Bend.
Family Counseling Services provides help to strengthen children, individuals and families by providing professional therapy, education, advocacy and other support at no charge. The services cover all age groups.
"For people as young as age three, we'll do play therapy with that age group all the way up into our senior services program for people in the senior population who have really a specialized set of needs," said Kristi Phillips, clinical director and licensed marriage and family therapist.
According to Phillips, any problem affecting one family member will impact all family members.
"Just because parents are divorced doesn't mean they don't parent together anymore. So we work hard to make sure that parents are working together to do what's best for their children," Phillips said.
According to Phillips the agency focuses on every issue that could affect a family, like crime victim's services.
"You're talking about the legal process, time off from work to deal with investigators, making statements. Moreover, of course, that involves all the emotional processes that go along with them," Phillips said.
The nonprofit agency provides therapy that costs over $100 an hour.
"And our average reimbursement tends to be about $55 to $56 dollars an hour, so we suffer a loss for each therapy hour," Executive Director David Schroll said.
According to Schroll, Family Counseling provided 8,000 therapy hours each of the past two years, and the number jumped after Hurricane Harvey.
"I think post-Harvey and everything like that, we look to be on schedule to do about 10,000 billable hours," Schroll said.
Family Counseling Services depends on donations.
"The funding that we get from things like the Day of Giving allows us to provide the services for people who don't have resources," Phillips said.
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