STEPS has a passion for families; the heart of that passion is children.

STEPS Family Resource Center was founded in 2010 to offer a safe, home-like environment in which children could enjoy supervised visitations with non-custodial family members.  Each of our four visitation rooms are furnished with couches, tables, chairs, toys, activities, books, games, a television and DVD player.  With an overall mission to strengthen families, STEPS offers services that promote Safety, Training, Education and Prevention that provide Solutions for families in crisis. Throughout the years of operation, STEPS has continuously sought out ways to fill gaps in service for children and families, causing our services to the community to consistently grow.  Currently, STEPS offers the following services:

• Supervised visitation monitoring
  
• Safe exchange
• Mental health counseling
• Nurturing Parenting Skills for Families classes
• Parents Forever co-parenting classes
  
• SAMHSA Anger Management classes
• Healing Steps life skills classes
• Better Life Program mentoring, case-plan assistance, and resource referrals\
• Restore Hope 100 Families collaborative partner
  
• Purple Patch Thrift Store clothing vouchers

STEPS also has a working partnership with the Arkansas DHS Division of Children and Family Services (DCFS).

As a service to the community, STEPS allows DCFS to utilize our four visitation rooms for visits between children in foster care and their biological families.  With STEPS audio/video recording, DCFS staff can observe visits outside the visitation rooms, allowing families to better enjoy their time together.  The DCFS Team Decision Making meeting facilitators utilize the STEPS education room for meetings with families entering into protective services cases.  The neutral setting of STEPS helps to reduce anxiety in parents and children attending these life-altering meetings.  This promotes a more collaborative atmosphere, in which DCFS staff can work with families in crisis toward developing an action plan for preserving their family without the traumatic removal of their children,

STEPS also offers a Safe-Exchange program, which provides parents with a neutral third party to exchange children between their custodial and non-custodial parents for unsupervised visits.  STEPS supervised visitations in which STEPS trained staff monitors visits, as well as the Safe Exchange services, are offered on an income-based, sliding scale fee structure.  If those fees cause a financial strain for parents,  STEPS offers clients an opportunity to instead volunteer at our local thrift store, The Purple Patch, in exchange for credit toward their account at STEPS.
 

In 2019, STEPS introduced Mental Health Counseling services.  This new program addresses clients' needs for resolving emotional barriers that may have prevented them from moving forward in life.  The STEPS licensed counselor not only provides an eclectic integrative approach to psychotherapy, but also offers other services such as: therapeutic supervised visitations; TOVA testing, which is used in the diagnosis of disorders such as ADHD in children and adults; and Brainspotting, which is a newer brain-therapy technique, proven to be helpful in healing emotional trauma, anxiety, depression and PTSD.

STEPS also provides evidence-based, court-approved parenting classes, which are free to families with open AR DHS/DCFS cases.  SAMHSA Anger Management, Parents Forever Co-Parenting and Healing Steps life skills classes are also available.  Parenting classes are also taught to residents of the Harbor House Gateway Recovery Center. 

STEPS created the Better Life Program to mentor families and individuals who have a desire to improve the condition and circumstances of their lives. We mentor/coach them weekly, helping them to identify goals and set action steps to achieve those goals - including creating a nurturing environment for their children.
 Lastly, STEPS has a small thrift store, The Purple Patch, which offers clients a place to volunteer in lieu of cash payment on their STEPS account for nearly all our program's services (not including counseling).