Mission
Texas Loves Children, Inc. (TLC) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose mission is to improve case outcomes for abused and neglected children by enhancing the quality of legal services they receive. The most important decisions about an abused or neglected child's future are made in court. TLC exists to help ensure that those decisions are the best possible for the child.
History
Texas Loves Children, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, was founded by Barbara Elias-Perciful in 1995 to provide specialized training about child abuse issues to Dallas judges and attorneys. Barbara had been practicing business litigation at the Dallas firm Carrington, Coleman, Sloman & Blumenthal, L.L.P., when she took a pro bono court appointment to represent an abused child. The heartbreaking situation—a 12-year-old girl who had been methodically sexually abused by her father for years—was made even more desperate when Barbara saw the lack of tools, research, and expertise readily available to assist judges and attorneys handling these cases. Shortly thereafter, Barbara left the law firm and opened a private practice devoted exclusively to representing abused children. She then established Texas Loves Children, Inc. (TLC) to provide highly specialized training to the legal community on complex child abuse issues, subjects not typically covered in law school. For the last 12 years, TLC has sponsored high-quality training seminars on critical legal, medical, and mental health issues for judges, attorneys, CPS workers, CASA volunteers, and law enforcement personnel.
In May 2004, Texas Loves Children launched the Texas Lawyers for Children website program—an interactive legal resource center designed to further extend the availability of training and information. In April 2007, California’s Administrative Office of the Courts chose this project as a model to address its state’s needs. This collaboration marked a momentous leap in realizing TLC’s goal of creating a national network of sites that work together to help children by sharing information and best practices. In November 2007, the Texas Supreme Court’s Task Force on Foster Care identified TLC’s website program as a key solution for improving the court system’s handling of child abuse cases.
Texas Loves Children is confident that with the continued involvement and support of the community, its vision will be achieved—that abused children nationwide are protected from further harm.
©Copyright 2007, Texas Loves Children, Inc....The children depicted here were not taken from actual child abuse cases.
Graphic design by Michael Garrett.