Grundy County Children’s Advocacy Center provides a place for child victims to share their story

The Grundy County Children’s Advocacy Center now has a home at the We Care building, 530 Bedford Road in Morris, and Executive Director Timberlie Jahn has come a long way from sitting in a desk at the Grundy County State’s Attorney’s Office, filling out grant applications.

The process for getting this far, however, didn’t start in October 2022, when Jahn was hired. It started earlier, when Jahn was a publicist in Los Angeles, and she decided she wanted a more fulfilling career.

“I had what we now call adverse childhood experiences,” Jahn said. “There’s 10 of them, and that’s in all types of child abuse to substance use in the home, different mental illnesses in the home, that sort of thing. I had experienced eight of the 10 of those. I didn’t know it then, and so that started to inform me about myself. What was I passionate about? What did I care about?”

Jahn said she was adopted when she was 5 years old after her mother lost custody, so she’d been in Los Angeles, but her family moved around a lot. She actually ended up living in Coal City when she was 11 years old.

She understands the background many of the people coming into the Children’s Advocacy Center come from, so she went back to school, finished her undergraduate degree in human development and gained a better perspective on her own life from it. From there, she went to graduate school and received her master’s degree in marriage and family therapy, specializing in trauma.

The Children’s Advocacy Center is a place that provides a safe space for children in unsafe situations, whether that means they’re a victim of a crime or they’re in need of a connection to services that can help heal them. Jahn’s job as a forensic interviewer means that she helps the police and state’s attorney interview children in a safe, comforting environment where they’re treated well instead of having a child go to a police station, where the environment could frighten them.

Jahn came to this career from after a long journey that started at a foster care agency in Los Angeles.

“There’s a really large population in foster care there, sadly, and working with those families and being on the front lines with kids going through adversities showed me that there’s resilience there,” Jahn said. “There’s healing, because I’ve been through it. I went through it without the social workers and the therapists, without the helping adults. I knew I could become that helper on the other side.”

Jahn moved to Illinois in 2018 after she was hired by the Department of Children and Family Services to work as a therapist before she moved on to working at the Pontiac Correctional Facility for two years. Her idea was that many of the children she worked with through DCFS had landed their way through the criminal justice system.

I believe in resiliency. I believe healing is possible. I believe the sooner we get in there with kids, the better outcomes they have and the more hope there is.”

—  Timberlie Jahn, Grundy County Children Advocacy Center executive director

“That was 100% of the truth,” Jahn said. “90% of my caseload had been in the child welfare system and had experienced childhood trauma. It was such an eye-opening tragedy to see where that had landed them, and the lifelong impact and the generational impact that was having.”

She said that after two years, she knew she wanted to get back on the victim advocate side so she could work full time with children before those lifelong tragic stories began.

“I believe in resiliency,” Jahn said. “I believe healing is possible. I believe the sooner we get in there with kids, the better outcomes they have and the more hope there is.”

She said she was excited for the director position when it came up. Jahn wasn’t sure what exactly it would entail, but she knew it would get her back on the right track.

Jahn has worked hard since her hiring to get every grant she can, working as a forensic interviewer inside the Grundy County Courthouse before working with We Care to get her own space. Before that, she would do her interviews with the children at the Morris Police Department. She worked with Children’s Advocacy Illinois, a group in Springfield that works with every Children’s Advocacy Center in the state, which assigned her a mentor and helped her figure out ways to obtain funding and get the community invested.

The community did get invested: Eric Fisher with We Care approached her about using the space the Children’s Advocacy Center now occupies, the Grundy County State’s Attorney’s Justice Board provided a generous donation, and the Morris Lions Club paid for construction on the restrooms and a soundproof wall. Grundy County Heroes and Helpers and Wendy Briley helped Jahn buy furniture so the interview room could feel more like a living room, and the Youth Philanthropy group through the Community Foundation of Grundy County donated $1,500 that Jahn was able to use to get a desk and some other furniture to fill out the office space.

Fisher said Jahn has been working at We Care one way or another since she moved to Morris, running the ACEs parenting class.

“She’s a childhood trauma expert, and she does such an amazing job with the class,” Fisher said. “We’ve done a ton of classes, and they’re always well attended. People get a lot of information from it, and it’s really helped a lot of families.”

They were in the middle of a parenting class when Fisher looked around the room and asked her about it. He knew he could sacrifice the space, since We Care has two other spaces for classrooms.

Fisher said Jahn is a wealth of knowledge and passionate about what she does.

“She’s just really, really good with people, working with kids, working with parents, and she’s got a way of taking situations and shining a light on them,” Fisher said. “Whether it’s childhood behavior or anything. It’s like, there’s a reason this child is behaving this way, and when we’ve been in the classes, she’s teaching and talking about childhood trauma and the adverse childhood experiences, you can see parents have an aha moment. Oftentimes, the parents themselves have experienced childhood trauma. She has a great way of highlighting it and helping them through it.”

Jahn said she wants the people she helps to understand that there’s hope, and she wants to build them up with connection, attunement and coping skills so they can make the positive choices. The first thing she did when she got pregnant at 19 was enroll in a child development course, although she had no intention of it becoming her career. She didn’t know what to do, but she believes the course set her straight. She sacrificed and gave up a lot, but her son is now 26 and a college graduate, and her daughter is finishing college at the University of California-Santa Barbara.

“It’s neat to see how I was 37 when I graduated with my master’s, and they’re already another generation that’s so much better off,” Jahn said.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 13 boys are victims of child sexual abuse, and 3 out of 4 adolescent sexual assault cases are assaults by someone the victim knows well.

Overall, 91% of perpetrators are known and trusted by the child and family, and females exposed to sexual abuse have an increased risk between two and 13 times of facing sexual violence in adulthood. If untreated, child sexual and physical abuse can have lifelong physical, mental and behavioral health consequences.