While many of us have our minds on the beach and the upcoming summer, some volunteers in our community were thinking of ways to keep children safe.

Project Safe Place is a national program stared by the YMCA that helps children in crisis. If a youth needs help, he or she can get it by going to a location displaying the yellow Safe Place logo. Once there, they receive immediate assistance from employees trained to respond to a child in crisis. The employees also notify professionals to ensure that appropriate steps are taken to resolve the situation. Here in North Central Florida, that means calling Corner Drug Store's Interface Youth Program. Safe Place sites are designed to be places “where kids can get help fast.” They can be found all over the community and include movie theaters, fast-food restaurants, clothing stores, libraries, and city busses, among others. The key to the program is that staff who work at these sites know what to do in case of an emergency involving youth. Alachua County is lucky to have 92 Safe Places, 72 of which are in Gainesville. But the question remains: Do employees really know what to do if a youth comes to them in trouble?

Laura Hernandez, a student intern at Corner Drug Store, decided to find out. Corner Drug Store serves as headquarters to the Safe Place program in North Central Florida. CDS not only provides the training to employees at Safe Place sites, but also constantly looks for new site locations. Over the course of a few weeks, Hernandez contacted every Safe Place site in Alachua County, added new locations to the database, mapped them all out, and then printed out directions to each site. She then organized a group of eight volunteers to visit the sites to see if their employees really do know what to do in case of an emergency. The name of this event was “Do it in a Day” because the goal was to visit all 72 Safe Place sites in Gainesville within one day. Each volunteer followed their map and visited about 10 locations. “Doing this project was a great benefit to our community,” said Hernandez, “It's good to see that something so simple can make a huge difference in a child's life.”

Many of the Safe Place sites were enthusiastic about their visitors and several felt they could benefit from additional training. Staff members from Corner Drug Store plan to visit these locations later in the month to give them the help they need. Overall, the event was a huge success. Volunteers met back at the Corner Drug Store afterwards to report their findings and receive a coupon, complements of Chick-Fil-A. However, the real reward at the end of the day was helping out the children in our communities.

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Interested in your business or organization becoming a Safe Place? Please call us at:

352-334-3800 ext. 3812

-or-

email (email clicks over to kelly_mangan@cdsfl.org )

In addition to Safe Place, CDS offers many other great volunteer experiences.

Locations displaying this sign are "Safe Places"

Laura Hernandez coordinated "Do it in a Day"

Click map for a list of Safe Place sites in Gainesville.