HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, Fla. — It’s National Safe Place Week and Hillsborough County Children’s Services wants to remind kids and teens that they can receive immediate help in a crisis.
“We need to let people know that kids don’t have to be on the street. There is a safe place for them to go. There’s some people out there that’s going to be willing to help them. This service is 100% free. In crisis, you just need to know how to get to a place fast,” said Nikki Martin, Quality Assurance Manager for Hillsborough County Children’s Services.
It’s a program for kids and teens who are experiencing things like homelessness, may not have a safe place to sleep, are dealing with any kind of domestic abuse, or feel the need to run away.
They can text their location and the word ‘SAFE’ to ‘4HELP’ (44357) and within seconds, they’ll get a message with the closest safe place site and the phone number of children’s services.
They’ll be able to get help at one of the dozens of safe place locations across Hillsborough County.
The yellow and black ‘Safe Place’ signs on certain buildings indicate that they’re part of this program and will likely be open 24 hours a day with trained staff to help anyone under the age of 18.
“Any place that displays that, a young person can go in there, say, hey I need help, I need to access safe place, and what will happen is that location will call children’s services and tell them hey we have a young person who needs to utilize safe place and then we will dispatch a person to come and get that young person, bring them back to our facility and then we start the process of reuniting them going back home or just helping them in general,” said Martin.
Officials said this resource is more important than ever because there’s been a growing need to help kids stay off the streets.
“It’s definitely something that’s very needed in the community. We’ve known that it’s been an issue, it’s a growing issue, and we want to be a solution to help address that,” said Martin.
“We have reports of how this area has been an attracter for people who human traffic young people. Just being on the streets, in general, is just a very, very dangerous space for young people to be in,” she added.
