Our History
ChildFirst North Carolina began as a grassroots effort among several county Departments of Social Services and law enforcement agencies in Cumberland County. Our group recognized the importance of providing quality training to social workers, law enforcement personnel and others who work with child victims of abuse. We recognized the need to be able to offer a cost effective training in North Carolina based on the turnover rates of front line professionals in child protective services and detectives working with juvenile cases.
Prior to the development of ChildFirst North Carolina we were sending staff to Minnesota for the training at a cost of approximately 2500.00 each. We began to research what was involved in bringing a nationally recognized forensic interviewing training to North Carolina. After much discussion of the available trainings we decided to try to bring the ChildFirst program to North Carolina. Their program offered an infrastructure that was already in place and a train the trainer model.
We wrote a grant with our Child Advocacy Center to bring ChildFirst to North Carolina. Our application was accepted and we began the year long certification process in August 2011. We are proud to be a part of the Gunderson National Child Protection Training Center’s ChildFirst program. North Carolina is one of 19 states and two countries utilizing the ChildFirst training. We have a volunteer faculty of trained professionals in the field. We have trained over 100 professionals representing 25 counties in North Carolina.
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