About ABC Counseling and Family Services

Mission

The mission of ABC is to help families grow through adoption and to help families heal from the trauma of sexual abuse.  Through service and advocacy, ABC Counseling & Family Services seeks to bring justice, healing and wholeness to the people it serves and to enhance the quality of people’s lives.

History

ABC Counseling & Family Services, Inc. was founded in September of 1992. It is a private, not-for-profit, non-sectarian agency with its home office located in Normal, Illinois. The agency was opened to meet the need for specialized services in adoption and sexual abuse assessments and treatment. Executive Director, Lynn Willard, came to the agency in 1992 with almost twenty years of social service experience, the last ten of which were spent in adoption and sexual abuse counseling. The Director had a dream of opening an agency that would specialize in a couple of areas of social service, and one that would be very personalized and not bureaucratic. The Director recognized the importance of personalizing client's needs rather than obtaining notoriety. She had experienced first hand the sorrow of adoptive couples being turned away from agencies because they were too old to adopt or because they would wait longer than couples of a particular religious affiliation. She had worked with older children placed in adoptive homes who had been sexually abused and found there were no counselors specifically trained to provide individual and group counseling.

Since ABC Counseling & Family Services opened, the agency has served more than 1000 clients and over 2,000 families throughout Central Illinois. Our staff has grown from one full-time and one-part-time person to 10 full-time staff with a steady stream of MSW interns.  ABC has also expanded and opened an office in Champaign/Urbana and Decatur, Illinois. The agency recruits student interns from Illinois State University along with other universities and trains these bachelor's and master's level students in skills from Adoption and Sexual Abuse Counseling to Business and Public Relations.

Our Future

ABC is moving towards a period in which it is recognized and utilized as a regional resource, not just a local one.  We want to provide more training within the community to educate people on sexual abuse and adoption topics.  We want to analyze and publish more than 14 years worth of data we’ve collected to further the development of treatment methods.  We plan to become more involved in juvenile justice issues, with an emphasis on healing.  We plan to expand our adoption services to reach more children and more families.  We also want to purchase more equipment, hire more staff, and send them to more training in order to continue to provide the best and most specialized treatment available in Central Illinois and beyond.