Tonight, October 4th the Family Service Agency of Burbank (FSA) will present an award named for an extraordinary Burbank woman and one of their visionary founding board members, Mary Alice O’Connor to Burbank’s County Supervisor Kathyrn Barger.
It was Mary Alice’s intention that the award spotlight an individual who shares FSA’s sense of urgency to create and sustain safe spaces where Burbank’s youth, adults, and families can access, without obstacle, mental health counseling, awareness education, prevention programs, and critical advocacy.
FSA was founded 66 years ago for this purpose and never has their mission been more relevant. In the last 20 years, due to a rare relationship with city’s leadership, FSA has researched, developed, implemented, and sustained a nationally recognized school-based counseling program, 3 long-term transitional homes serving homeless families, foster and emancipated youth, and battered women and their children – and FSA’s 2 groundbreaking Student CARE Centers located at Burbank and John Burroughs High School campuses.
During the 2018/19 the school year, 1706 students initiated 14,874 visits to our school-based Student CARE Center’s alone seeking life-changing – all too often life-saving support. Other FSA school-based counseling programs cared for an additional 1611 staff referred to students.
FSA’s leadership has followed and admired Supervisor Barger’s commitment to mental healthcare over the years, deeply respect her work on behalf of our veterans, foster youth, and the homeless.
We are all relying on her leadership and on her fierce commitment to creating awareness and access for our teens suffering from feelings of alienation, isolation, anxiety, depression – considering suicide.
It is for these reasons and so many more that… Family Service Agency of Burbank’s Board of Directors is honored to invite you to join them as FSA of Burbank honors Supervisor Kathryn Barger as this year’s 2019 recipient of The Mary Alice O’Connor Vision Award.
The award will be presented at FSA’s annual Imagine a City Gala to be held on Friday evening, October 4th