Crisis Center of Tampa Bay adds Success 4 Kids & Families

People in desperate moments reach out to the Crisis Center of Tampa Bay for help.
Whether they’re contemplating suicide, suffering sexual or physical abuse, struggling with alcohol or drug addiction, or facing other problems, they get immediate counseling and referrals for help.

And now, because of its recent merger with Success 4 Kids & Families, the 53-year- old Crisis Center is providing long-term behavioral and emotional counseling for children and families, enabling children to stay with their families and in the community instead of in a mental health facility. Their services include case management and community-based therapy services for school-age children and teens and specialized services for adolescents and young adults.

With the addition of Success 4 Kids & Families, the Crisis Center now has four divisions. The other three are the Gateway Contact Center, which concentrates on suicide prevention, crisis counseling, and information and referrals; Corbett Trauma Center, offering trauma counseling and sexual assault survivor services; and TransCare, providing basic life support ambulance service and behavioral health transport.

With about 400 full and part-time employees and 70 volunteers, the Crisis Center served 160,000 people last fiscal year, says President and CEO Clara Reynolds. With Success 4 Kids & Families now part of the organization, Reynolds says the Crisis Center will be able to serve clients for a longer period of time – generally six months to two years – and address all their needs.

Back in 2005, Reynolds was actually a founder of Success 4 Kids & Families and its first executive director. She had been working with the school system, counseling students with severe behavioral and emotional problems, when the Children’s Board of Hillsborough County received a large federal grant to redesign the system of care for such children.

“The Children's Board wanted to create an independent case management program focused on serving children that were considered the most expensive,” she recalls. “These were kids that were in psychiatric hospitals, juvenile justice facilities, child welfare, those kinds of things.’’

Reynolds and several colleagues took on the effort.

“What we learned over the years, we recognized that we could work with any child, any family, regardless of how significant their issues were, utilizing this independent case management model,” she says. “And that’s how it started.”

At the start of 2024, Success 4 Kids & Families’ leadership team started looking into the possibility of merging its services into another nonprofit organization to ensure the long-term stability and growth of those programs. Reynolds, who has led the Crisis Center since 2015, told her board of directors that she was a “biased advocate” for adding Success 4 Kids & Families as a division of the Crisis Center.

“Our board went through an incredibly thorough due diligence process,’’ she says, “and at the end of the day the board of the Crisis Center decided this was an important opportunity for our community and for the Crisis Center, to take on this organization.’’

The Crisis Center had already been collaborating with Success 4 Kids & Families in some of its programs, including its Healthy Transitions program, which works with individuals ages 16 to 24.

“We would take the calls from that age group and refer them to Success 4 Kids & Families. And then they have a program for young adults who are experiencing their first onset of psychosis; we were providing some medical support to them,’’ Reynolds says. “So there was a lot of synergy already, but we weren’t providing the types of services that Success offered, so that was another very appealing aspect of having them come on board and be a division of the Crisis Center.’’

She says Success 4 Kids & Families enhances her agency’s mission to ensure that no person faces crisis alone.

For help and information, call 211 to reach the Crisis Center of Tampa Bay or go to Crisis Center of Tampa Bay