Many people in Clarke County are unaware of an agency that provides a myriad of resources to benefit the youth in the area: Canopy Children’s Solutions.
Canopy Children’s Solutions is a non-profit organization that offers different children’s behavioral health, educational, and social service solutions. Each year, they are able to assist around 6,400 youth and their families. They have a mission to help children and families overcome different challenges through a variety of solutions.
Over the years, the agency has changed and developed. One of the major changes was a change to the organization’s name after it expanded to have multiple programs to help others.
“Our agency opened in 1912 and was called Mississippi Children’s Home Society. It was actually started in Meridian as an adoption agency,” explained lead therapist Nicole McCree. “We went through a name change around 2017 and went to Canopy Children’s Solutions. The reason for the switch was that we have so many programs under our umbrella. Our Meridian office services nine counties, and Clarke County is one of the counties we serve.”
They have added much more than just adoption. Now, the agency is able to assist even more kids in the community and help families stay together more.
“We have adoption. We have therapeutic foster homes. We have a day treatment school, which is one of our facilities in Jackson and other places around the state.
We also have the first autism school in the state of Mississippi in Jackson,” described Nicole. “We have a lot of great things in our agency. We have some new and exciting things that are coming out. We can’t release that information yet, but it will benefit special needs children and children with disabilities, dyslexia, and all of that.”
With all the different programs offered, there is one thing that they all make sure to have so that each family involved will receive the appropriate assistance.
“Every one of our programs has a therapist and a case manager,” explained Nicole. “We work as a team. We also have peer support specialists. We have nurses, certified principals, and certified teachers in our school. We have a certified psychiatrist where we can do our own medication management.”
One of the programs offered is in-CIRCLE. It is a program where Child Protection Services (CPS) refers families, and they do what they can to make sure that the families are able to have the support needed to preserve or reunify families. Instead of focusing on removing the child from the home, they do what they can to minimize the problem the family is facing so that families can stay together. They have a very high success rate so far.
“We have a 98% rate of keeping the children safe in homes with families,” stated Nicole.
Another important program offered is MYPAC.
“MYPAC is on-call 24 hours a day and comes with a therapist, wrap around facilitator, who works with children with serious emotional disorders or behavior problems,” informed Nicole. “It is a step right below a facility.”
MYPAC ensures that parents/guardians and children have access to the resources they need. They offer psychiatric services, medication management, and individual and family therapy.
One of the newer programs the agency has is LINK, which is available to everyone.
“It’s one of our new programs. Anyone can be in LINK. It’s a free service where we link families to resources,” expressed Nicole. “Our LINK staff helps families find housing, find resources for housing, find resources to pay bills, find resources for furniture, etc. They do parenting classes, domestic violence classes, sexual abuse classes, and all of that.”
Some of the resources that LINK offers families are food stability, utility assistance, unemployment, housing, mental health challenges, substance abuse challenges, teen pregnancy, and parenting classes. They offer necessary classes and other resources to make sure families have the support they need to stabilize family situations. The program is free to those in community since it is funded through a grant with the Mississippi Department of Human Services.
The workers at Canopy love to be able to help others and receive joy from seeing how different families benefit from their help. This past year, they did a drive to assist children with school supplies.
“One of my things is to always give back. I just love serving people. In August, we had our first ever Back to School Drive. It went well. We publicized, the people came in, and the staff had everything set up real nice,” stated Nicole. “It was set to last until 5:00. By around 4:05, we were all tired and ready to go and thinking about going ahead and leaving. At 4:10, a lady who just moved here walked through our door. She had nine kids and didn’t have anything. I can’t recall how many staff members were in the office, but they started going everywhere. That lady walked out with boxes of school supplies. Because we have resources in our office where people donate things, she walked out with sheets for her bedding, clothes, dishes, everything to put in her apartment, and she walked out with food that we have stored in the office. That was one of the highlights, and when it was over we all looked around wondering what just happened. It just gave us joy to know we were helping others and could make a mother’s day.”
After the successful day with the Back to School Drive, they knew they wanted to do more to help the people in the community.
“Right then and there we decided to do a Christmas Drive. Even though we serve kids in the inCircle program who are in CPS custody, not all of our kids are in CPS custody,” continued Nicole. “The state takes care of the kids who are in CPS custody, but we were also thinking about the families that are struggling and not in custody. We wanted to make sure that those families had just as much as a child that was in custody and not on the verge of being removed. We put together a toy drive. We served up to 100 kids with our toy drive.”
They are again doing a drive to assist kids in the community—primarily those in CPS.
“Right now we are doing our luggage drive. When I was getting ready for the Toy Drive and talking about it to the CPS staff and telling them how I wanted to help them out with their kids, one of the supervisors told me that if I really want to help CPS then they need a Luggage Drive,” announced Nicole. “I’ve been at CPS offices where I’ve seen kids come into custody with a brown bag in their hands or a black trash bag over their shoulders. That’s their belongings. It upsets me to know that a child is carrying things around like that because what would happen when the bags break. It was on my heart to do a Luggage Drive to help the kids. So far, we have about 20 pieces of luggage donated to our office. The cutoff date isn’t until March 31.”
Those who would like to donate to the luggage drive have two great options.
“People can drop it off at our office, 2211 Highway 45 North Suite 5, in Meridian,” said Nicole. “They can also contact me and either one of my staff members or I will come pick it up. My phone number is 601-616-6792.”
Anyone who needs to contact Canopy for assistance in any of their great services can do so by calling Canopy’s Care Coordinator at 800-388-6247.
