Click here to register for the 2025 CAPCC Children’s Memorial Day and Flag Raising
Click here to register for the 2025 CAPCC Roundtable
Click here to register for the 2025 CAPCC Roundtable
CAPCC on Access Humboldt!
Every April CAPCC honors individuals and/or organizations that are doing exceptional work in the field of child abuse prevention and intervention. The following are our 2025 Children First recipients.
April 2025 Children First Award Recipients
More to come…
April 2023 Children First Award Recipients
Two Feathers Native American Family Services offers a comprehensive set of services to high-risk Native youth in Humboldt County, including those that present with high acuity in both substance abuse and mental health disorders and those most impacted by intergenerational trauma. The services include trauma-informed community and school-based psychotherapy, weekly groups, locally-informed prevention programs, and culturally-based intensive support (in school or home).
Two Feathers’ approach is to build meaningful relationships with youth in order to do the deep work. With this approach, our team members have small caseloads so they are able to spend more time with the youth gaining trust, working on treatment plans, and supporting the families.
Two Feathers enhances connection to uplift the culture, goals, and aspirations of Native youth. Participants will be better bonded to families; develop interpersonal skills; improve decision making and resiliency; and lower risk taking behavior to reduce harm, increase skills, and improve health.
In 2022, Two Feathers engaged 270 Native youth in counseling services with a total of 3,719 individual counseling sessions. In addition, Two Feathers shared cultural programming with over 250 youth and employed 67 youth in their Youth Ambassador program.
The work the Two Feathers NAFS team members are doing with our youth is transformational! The youth are engaged and showing up because they value Two Feathers relationships.
The website Two Feathers Native American Family Services
Lex Siebuhr – RCAA Youth Service Bureau Raven Project Coordinator
I am abby hamburg (he/him) and I work with Evolve Youth Services, a local post adoptive wraparound agency based out of Arcata. I have organized with Lex for about 10 years now in various spaces, but watching them work directly with some of my Client’s at Queer Coffee House truly moved me. Past facilitators of this space would put on a movie and call it good. Lex facilitates intentional conversations with often heavy topics that really help the youth process their identity, find acceptance and move from surviving to thriving.
Our current state of affairs has proven now more than ever the importance of creating a safe space for queer and houseless youth to show up and be themselves. Lex and The Raven Project staff provide some pretty exhausting and depleting direct services. Working to house youth when we don’t have housing to offer in this county, Lex still manages to give youth hope and motivation for a better tomorrow. This keeps youth enthusiastically engaged in services, returning to Lex for help with their next life obstacle.
Providing spaces that allow freedom of expression for youth is pertinent to their development of a whole self. I have seen first hand how Lex does a phenomenal job providing youth with guidance, hope and safety while also always offering them encouragement and critical analysis of the ways they move through the world. Lex not only asks how youth can show up for themselves better, but goes one step further to cultivate an environment that nurtures the possibility for youth to show up for each other.
We have all worked within the confines of the non-profit industrial complex, the difficulties that come with burnt out Supervisors and Co-workers, internalized homophobia and more are the realities of advocating for queer youth that make this work unnecessarily difficult.. Lex is often forced to jump through hoops and advocate at length for the safety and inclusion of our county’s most vulnerable populations. This means Lex is often left stuck between a rock and a hard place.
They deal directly with calls from homophobic community members that go unreported in fear that spaces that support queer youth won’t be able to exist if people know they are being threatened. That’s right, the attacks on queer youth spaces don’t just happen in the ‘conservative states’ across the nation, they also happen right here in our Rural County. This country is in the midst of a silencing agenda. Laws are being put into place to ban gender expression and discourage self-exploration. Any Early Childhood practitioner will tell you that self-exploration is a key part of development for a healthy child. Lex cultivating safe spaces week after week at the Raven Project is why I nominated them for this award. The work they are doing is truly transformative.
I think Lex is courageous. They show up and put the Child First in every sense of the phrase. Lex is compassionate, thoughtful, and intelligent. They use their skills to serve their community and they are deserving of so much more than just this award.
The website Care Spells Consulting
abby hamburg
abby hamburg (he/him) has been providing child and youth services on Wiyot Territory for the last 6 years. Working for various community agencies such as Changing Tides, Boys and Girls Club and Humboldt Domestic Violence Services, abby has settled in spending the last three years at Evolve Youth Services as a Child Family Specialist and Outreach Coordinator. abby really enjoys advocating for 2SLGBTQIA+ youth and breaking down the barriers we deal with trying to provide expansive services to queer youth. abby values maintaining strong community connections through the lenses of harm reduction, restorative justice and mutual aid. Utilizing these values abby brings compassionate services to the forefront of his job serving the whole family, not just the youth he works with directly.
“Having transformative conversations with caregivers, school staff and community members is not always easy but it leaves a lasting impact, in hopes that each day is easier for youth to walk through the world as their true selves.” – abby
The website Home | Evolve Youth Services
@evolveyouthservices | Instagram
Evolve Youth Services | Facebook
April – Child Abuse Prevention Awareness Month.
- First Tuesday of the month – Board of Supervisors proclamation
- Mid-month – Annual conference and awards luncheon
- Last Friday of the month – Children’s Memorial Flag Raising Ceremony
December – Stress & the Holiday campaign
- Radio spots, movie theater spots and a winter newsletter full of lots of free or low cost activities and ideas to do with your family