If your child needs free early learning help, behavioral counseling, a vision test, medical treatment, or swimming lessons; if your family needs legal assistance, help with housing, or parenting tips, and you don’t know where to turn, the Children’s Board of Hillsborough County has a free online tool to point you in the right direction.
The 2025 Family Guide, available in
English and
Spanish, lists telephone numbers and websites for the community organizations and resources available in Hillsborough County. The online version is on the
Children’s Board’s website and printed copies are available at the seven Children’s Board Family Resource Centers scattered around the county, from Ruskin to Plant City to North Tampa.
“It really is a directory of so many resources that are provided at no cost to children and families,’’ says Children’s Board Director of Public Relations Dexter Lewis.
At the very beginning, the guide urges parents to learn how to prevent accidental
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The Children's Board of Hillsborough County 2025 Family Guide is available online in English and Spanishdeaths of children. The guide says there were 306 preventable deaths of children in the Tampa Bay region between 2013 and 2023 and shares these warnings:
“More infants die in adult beds than anywhere else. Drowning kills more kids ages 1-4 than any other cause. Shaking infants, even once, can kill or injure them for life.’’
Created by referendum in 1988 as a special taxing district, the Children’s Board served 163,068 children and families last year, Lewis says. The budget for fiscal year 2025 is $91,645,608. The Children’s Board funds 53 nonprofit agencies and 90 programs to fulfill its mission of investing in partnerships and quality programs “to support the success of all children in Hillsborough County.”
Some agencies it helps fund are Achieve Plant City, which offers early childhood education training, developmental screenings, literacy skills testing, and tutoring for children 18 months through 5th grade and their parents; the Family Enrichment Center, whose Autism is Real program provides “all embracing’’ support for families with children from age 3 years through 4th grade who have been identified as needing neuro development assistance; and the Children’s Home Network Kinship Hillsborough program, which helps relatives and caregivers of children whose parents are absent.
Well-known organizations that receive the Children’s Board funding include the Boys & Girls Clubs of Tampa Bay, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Tampa Bay, Crisis Center of Tampa Bay, Easterseals Florida, Inc., Girl Scouts of West Central Florida, and Healthy Start Coalition of Hillsborough County.
Lewis says the Children’s Board’s services continue to grow.
“We continue to try to find new ways of providing those crucial services,” he says. “We can’t do it without the nonprofit community. They’re the ones that are applying for the grants and being awarded the grants. They’re the boots on the ground in the community, developing relationships with parents, with children, just doing a wonderful job.”
Children’s Board Family Resource Centers Early Childhood Services Coordinator Lynique Beckford says each center is a hub of services for children and families.
“A Hillsborough County resident can walk in to request any information and we’ll try
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Children’s Board Family Resource Centers Early Childhood Services Coordinator Lynique Beckford doing learning activities with children at one of the resource centers our best to assist in linking them to any services (they) need,’’ she says.
The resource centers have programs that focus on education and health. They work with BayCare to bring in a mobile medical clinic and dental bus. The program Beckford supervises provides extra support for families who have at least one child 5 years old or younger in the household.
They try to help with “any issue, obstacle, a little bump in the road that a family may have so that it doesn’t become a full-blown crisis,’’ Beckford says. “In doing so we’re helping to stabilize their environment, trying to help them stabilize themselves financially and basically providing information and referral.’’
For more information, go to Children's Board of Hillsborough County and Children's Board Family Resource Centers
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