Kleos Children's Community sees the purpose of its endeavor as an avenue of redemption, preservation conservation, and rehabilitation of both child and family. This includes the expression of love, wisdom and education, with the emphasis on constructive attitudes towards problems, and the intellectual and spiritual growth of children towards mature manhood and womanhood.

Kleos Children's Community was formed to put vision to work. That is more than just a catchy phrase. It involves the basic philosophies of Kleos Children's Community. Our mission and goal is to inspire individuals, businesses, corporations, churches, and state and local social services to think with king-sized vision and then help them translate that vision into reality.

We at Kleos Children's Community have designed a vehicle that can release the potential of technical skill, financial resources, and personal capabilities by applying accurate and positive principles to the key issues of life for children in need of someone to care.

In fulfilling its mission, Kleos Children's Community must demonstrate that which is the very meaning of the Greek word "KLEOS", which is being of good reputation and good report. Therefore, we will endeavor to pursue salvaging children in need by:

• First, demonstrating love, compassion, and understanding in all of our relationships;
• Second, be of excellent professional quality, proficiently administered and closely linked to other services in the community and state;
• Third, be a leader in discovering, recruiting and training leadership which understands and appreciates the philosophy of Kleos Children's Community, understands the needs of state social services, and be an effective spokesman for both;
• Fourth, equating itself with the social, economic, educational, cultural and spiritual conditions that exist and how these affect the lives of children, families and society;
• Fifth, seek to provide adequate physical and educational facilities and to acquire financial resources with which to discharge its responsibilities and actualize its opportunities to care for children in need, and
• Sixth, evaluate itself regularly and be ready to make whatever changes and adjustments that are necessary in response to changing needs for service by developing stronger methods that will respond to the needs of abused, neglected, dependent and homeless children.

        1. Personally destructive behavior (suicide);

        2. Socially destructive behavior (crime);

        3. Mental or emotional disease;

        4. Some form of chemical dependency (drugs, alcohol); or

        5. Dependency on the state and government (welfare)

But how can child care agencies, churches, corporations, state and government, and society in general prevent such deterioration that is happening in our youth today? One staggering thought is, at least half of the dollars spent for prisons be matched of the prevention of child deterioration.

Prevention begins by concentrating on the fundamental needs of children. They need healthy homes and happy families. They need to be accepted and affirmed. They need nurture and guidance, stimulation, discipline and affection. Children need a "normal" home environment. Above all, children need good parenting. Parents are the primary preventors, for through their positive influence and persistent efforts, those healthy conditions can be created that avert the need for later psychiatric treatment and treatment centers.

Is it really necessary to dwell on such concerns? Most people are certainly aware of the fundamental importance of home and family and primarily preventative or constructive role of parents, or are they?

It is the realization, or rediscovery that parents are primary preventors, that there is no more an important place than home and family. This contributes to the founding of KLEOS CHILDREN'S COMMUNITY, a child caring agency that provides group homes for children; people who place their major emphasis on the indispensable role and responsibility of being good parent models. Parents, home and family are absolutely essential to normal growth, and thereby, truly preventative. That environment constitutes primary prevention. Society must begin to understand the needs of the multitudes of abused, neglected, homeless, and throw-away children in our country today, and that our lives must together make a difference. That knowledge will put life, work, mission and compassion into a value perspective. It should cause us to draw upon the resources and reality that we must put forth the effort to salvage the most precious possession of human beings, our children.

What are the needs of the children? There is an ever-increasing problem that continues to present itself, and that is more and more children are unwanted. There is an ever-increasing number of children who are being battered and abused, emotionally, physically, and sexually. Just in the State of Oregon there were 8,018 child abuse victims in 1995, a 0.9 percent increase from the previous year. There were 11,014 incidents of child abuse, an increase of 2.0 percent. 157 were sexual abuse cases. A record 36 Oregon children died in 1995 from causes related to abuse and neglect.

In Klamath County in 1995 there were 305 child abuse victims. In November of 1996, over forty children were brought to Klamath County State Offices for Children and Families (SCF). It is reported that approximately 85% of all children who were removed from their homes, was due to parents on drugs and or alcohol.

This is just Klamath County and the State of Oregon, but every county and state has its own sad and despairing statistics. What are we living for? What are we working for? What do we believe is truly meaningful or important? Child care agencies, churches, corporations, state and government, and society in general, we must together "make a difference for the children", regardless of whatever else we might accomplish.

Why don't the churches, corporations, businesses, and individuals in society speak out and provide for the abused, neglected, homeless and throw-away children? It has generally been because it is thought to be quite expensive to operate. There is an air of 'let the state and government do it, they have the money and the resources, and we're paying for it in any case'. That heart attitude breeds not only a diminishing of personal giving, but what is much more serious, is a drying up of personal and community concern for children in need of someone to care.

The facts are, people do tend to let the state and government do it all, but the magnitude of the need is such that the state and government can't do it all. There is a great reservoir of society that must be actuated to come alongside of the state and government, and serve them with other available resources by developing positive preventative programs, thus relieving the everyday pressures the SCF offices endure.

Socrates is said to have once asked his fellow Athenians,

"Why is it you turn and scrape every stone to gather wealth and neglect your children to whom, one day, you might relinquish all?"

Similarly, the following lines have been attributed to Abraham Lincoln:

Children are people who are going to carry on what you have started. They are going to sit where you are sitting, and when you are gone, attend to those things which you think are important. You may adopt all the policies you please, but how they are carried out depends upon the children today. They will assume control of your cities, churches, schools, universities and corporations. All your books are going to be judged, praised or condemned by them. The faith of humanity is in their hands.

Together, we must accept responsibility in providing homes for abused, neglected, and homeless children and continue to serve as the primary preventors. The word "primary" means "first, foremost, fundamental or basic". The word "prevent" doesn't not mean "to stop, thwart, hinder or hold back". It does not imply keeping someone from doing something, but is translated from the Latin "praevenire", which means to anticipate, to precede, to come before or go before. This is primary prevention of the first order, together, society meeting the needs of hurting children at "every corner" of their lives.

The many corners of life will be certainly magnified in the homes at KLEOS CHILDREN'S COMMUNITY. The daily traumas of the children, the intense emotional demands made on the nervous systems of the child care workers and the Kleos Houseparents, the innumerable program changes and calamities, the realities of funding and documentation of services are all encountered in an effort just to survive. Even such a noble endeavor as trying to help children in need and to provide surrogate parents and healthy home environments is never a matter of a simple straight line drawn from idea to its realization, rather it's a maze of menacing corners.

Primary prevention is the responsibility of all of us, it includes the children of countless fractured families, families destroyed, dissolved or devastated by drugs and social disaster, parents who are incapable of coping with the responsibility of rearing children and parents who are incarcerated, or absent without leave. KLEOS CHILDREN'S COMMUNITY's mission in residential child care along with the support of those who care is to provide an environment that approximates a normal home and family, genuinely caring people, a stimulating and sensitive program conducive to child development, and a stable family support system -- for this response alone constitutes primary prevention and serves as a deterrent to treatment for children, and later as adults.

To be truly preventative demands that we translate what we believe regarding primary prevention into action. To put our own faith in values as well as energy and resources into an order of priority. Our priority must be the child whose primary needs are parents, home and family. To accept that responsibility constitutes primary prevention and simultaneously calls us to action that will lead us to the innumerable hurting children who exist on life's corners and whose needs are "shelters that are safe and sacred".

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