Family Service Agency of Tippecanoe County was founded in 1964 after the United Way and the Mental Health Association conducted a needs assessment which reflected a pressing demand for effective community planning and advocacy for the needs of families, as well as affordable professional casework, counseling services, and referrals that would assist families of all income levels to love and care for each other throughout the life span.

Led by its first executive director Norm Johnson, our organization began in 1964 on the second floor of Lafayette’s First Federal Savings and Loan building, now Huntington Bank. In 1965, Lillian Kaplan replaced Johnson as executive director, and in 1966, the agency moved to 515 Columbia Street in the building now owned by New Directions. In 1975, the organization was officially incorporated in the state of Indiana.

Mental health and relationship counseling was the primary focus of our programs for several years. In the 70’s and 80’s, we added Homecare Services (providing cleaning, laundry, shopping, meal preparation, and support to disabled and frail elderly to help them remain independent in their own homes) and Family Self-Sufficiency (providing case management, support, and education to help adults gain the skills necessary break the cycle of economic dependence on public subsidies); Child Abuse Prevention (a school-based empowerment program for children from 3 to 12 years old); and Adult Protective Services (to investigate and intervene in situations involving concerns that frail elderly or disabled persons are being abused, neglected, or financially exploited.). Due to changes in state policy, we stopped providing this program in July 2005.

In 1979, Family Services moved again - to 225 North 4th Street in the first floor of the Fowler Apartment Building. In 1980, Family Services began providing homemaker services to Montgomery County. Today, a satellite office is located at 201 East Jefferson Street in Crawfordsville. In 1983, Family Services opened a White County office in Brookston’s Methodist Church, and after several other White County locations, is currently co-located with several other social service agencies in the Calvert Community Building on South Main Street in Monticello.

In 1984, Susan Smith became Family Services’ president and CEO. She remains in this leadership position today. In 1987, the agency changed its name to Family Services, Inc. to reflect the expansion of programs into surrounding counties. In 1988, the non-profit corporation Family Asset Management, Inc. was formed to own and manage the facility at for Family Services, Inc. at 731 Main Street in Lafayette.

In the 90’s, we added Consumer Credit Counseling Service (CCCS - providing certified credit counselors who offer professional consumer credit education to help people learn to use credit wisely, repay debt to creditors, and to better manage their money); Personal and Financial Counseling for Employees (which provides Employee Assistance Programs and CCCS to businesses who contract for these services to improve their employees' work performance); Families and Schools Together (FAST - a school-based substance abuse and delinquency prevention program); Dads Make a Difference (a program for non-custodial parents to learn how to successfully co-parent their children with the custodial parent and improve their rate of paying child support); Healthy Families (providing parenting and community resource information to every parent who delivers a child in Tippecanoe and Carroll counties, assesses them for risk factors correlated with child abuse and neglect, and offers them in-home support to strengthen their parenting skills). During this decade, we also developed Wheels to Work (a program which received donated vehicles, repaired them, and sold them to low-income families via no-interest loans) and agreed to administer the Long-Term Care Ombudsman program for the state of Indiana (to help families make informed decisions and respond to concerns about quality of care in nursing homes and assisted living facilities). However, due to changes in public policy which limited our effectiveness in delivering these programs, we chose to stop offering them in 2005.

As we entered the 21st century, we expanded our Family Life Education programs to include tobacco-cessation programming for adults and teens, added the nationally-recognized Parents as Teachers curriculum to the service delivery model utilized by our Healthy Families program, and started a new program of Adult Guardianship and Advocacy (an innovative volunteer limited guardian initiative designed to address the critical health care, social service and legal representation needs of the growing population of ill and at-risk incapacitated adults). We also developed plans to move to a new facility in 2007which will also house other non-profit agencies in order to better serve families in need, and to build our endowment to a multi-million dollar level which will decrease our dependence on government funds to support our services to the community.

On May 1, 2007, we moved into a brand new multi-agency facility, funded by North Central Health Services.  The Howarth Center, at 615 N 18th Street, will allow us to continue to move forward in serving the community.

The original goal of Family Services - to strengthen the communities we serve by strengthening their families - has remained our focus in developing an array of services to support families of all incomes throughout their life span. We intend to do so for many future generations, too!!!