Hernando County breaks ground on larger Children’s Advocacy Center

Hernando County leaders and You Thrive Florida broke ground on a larger Children’s Advocacy Center on Jacqueline Road, a move meant to fix a long-running space problem that has forced child-abuse services to stretch beyond the county’s 45-year-old main building in Brooksville.

The new center will cover 11,000 square feet, more than triple the 3,400-square-foot space the county has relied on for years. Janine Kell, the center director, said the goal is to give children a calmer place to talk about abuse, undergo forensic medical exams such as rape kits, and begin trauma therapy without the bottlenecks created by the current setup.

That matters because the Children’s Advocacy Center of Hernando County serves more than 800 children and their non-offending family members each year, including children ages 0 to 17 facing sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect, human trafficking, mental injury, drug-endangered circumstances and exposure to domestic violence. The center is Hernando County’s only nationally recognized, fully accredited CAC, and its work depends on close coordination with the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office, the Department of Children and Families, the State Attorney’s Office and the University of Florida Child Protection Team.

The county’s current footprint has already shown its limits. A Florida Senate funding request filed in December 2023 said the center had rented additional satellite office space over the previous two years because the main building at 711 Benton Avenue was no longer big enough. The request also said the center served more than 867 children and families in the prior year, including 301 children in trauma therapy.

Local lawmakers Blaise Ingoglia and Jeff Holcomb helped secure state appropriations that pushed the project forward. Kell said the organization had worried for years about how to finance a new home, and the project moved ahead only after those state dollars and other fundraising came together. The center’s price tag is about $3 million, with roughly $2 million already paid off and about $1 million still to raise.

The building could be finished in about 18 months, possibly sooner. When it opens, the center is expected to give investigators, medical providers and victim advocates more room to work under one roof, a setup that child-protection leaders say is best practice for interviews that must be developmentally sensitive, legally sound and non-suggestive.

The center, founded as a nonprofit in 2004, has become a hub for multidisciplinary case response in Hernando County, including advocacy, case management, forensic interviews, forensic medical exams and trauma therapy. With a larger facility on Jacqueline Road, county officials are betting that child victims and their families will spend less time navigating a fragmented system and more time getting coordinated care in one place.