Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

Baptist Children's Home offering counseling

PORTALES — The New Mexico Baptist Children’s Home has expanded its community services, offering free Christian counseling to area residents.

Executive Director Randy Rankin and family therapist Liz Wooley said with the children’s home reaching its 100th anniversary in 2019, officials with NMBCH began to reflect on what new services they could offer.

“Our thoughts were, what are we going to do for the next 100 years? We’ve been helping kids and families for the last 100 years, but we wanted to know what more we could do for our community,” Rankin said. “We’ve had a lot of calls asking if we offer counseling, people who don’t necessarily want to place their children with us, but they need help parenting their children.”

Wooley said the free counseling is already available via appointment, adding that a former cottage next to the NMBCH office building was altered to serve as a counseling center.

“As a counselor, I also had a lot of calls from people in Clovis and Portales looking for a Christian counselor, and we had no one to refer them to. This opened an opportunity for us to do that,” she said.

Rankin said it is not just children who have suffered emotional abuse that NMBCH helps but children who are dealing with emotional pain or children who need a home with a productive parenting environment.

“Some things have been building up, and it gets to a crisis situation, and the children are acting up and the parents don’t know how to begin dealing with the situation,” Wooley said. “That’s where we step in and help, hopefully before it escalates to a really bad situation.”

Rankin said NMBCH staff are also looking at holding conferences on parenting, money management, “anything that might help a parent succeed.”

Rankin said offering counseling and training to parents are “preventative measures” that could mean children would never have to come to the children’s home, because their home life could be improved.

“I think there comes a point where we all need some help,” Rankin said. “There are some people who desire a safe space counselor; we would just be one of their options.”

For information on counseling services: 575-359-1254.

 
 
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