Serving Children and Families Across a Vast, Underserved Region

Building Infrastructure that Protects Nevada Children and Families

In rural Nevada, children who experience abuse often face a painful reality: the services they need simply aren’t close enough to reach. Carson City Rural Child Advocacy Center exists to close that gap. Serving children and families across a vast, underserved region, CCRCAC brings together law enforcement, medical professionals, therapists, and child welfare experts under one roof to ensure every child receives a coordinated, trauma-informed response.

With support from Serving Our Communities Foundation, CCRCAC continues building the infrastructure that protects Nevada’s most vulnerable children and strengthens the systems designed to serve them.

There is a statistic that is hard to sit with: for every incident of child abuse or neglect that is reported, an estimated two go unreported. In a rural region like Northern Nevada, where communities are spread across hundreds of miles and resources are thin, that gap between what happens and what gets addressed is not abstract. It is the difference between a child who gets help and one who doesn’t.

Serving Our Communities Foundation founded the Carson City Rural Child Advocacy Center to make sure more children get help, and to make sure that when they do, they are not burdened with a process that is time consuming, repetitive, and overly-complicated. 

The center serves children and families across eight Northern Nevada counties: Carson City, Churchill, Douglas, Humboldt, Lyon, Mineral, Pershing, and Storey. Its model is built on a Multidisciplinary Team approach, meaning that from the moment a case is reported, professionals from across disciplines work together rather than in parallel. Forensic interviewers gather information with trained care. Medical personnel conduct evaluations and collect evidence. Victim advocates walk alongside families from the first day through resolution and beyond. Mental health professionals provide trauma-informed therapy designed specifically for children and families recovering from abuse. 

This coordinated approach matters because child abuse does not have neat edges. A child’s healing is not just a medical question or a legal question or an emotional question. It is all of those things at once, and it requires a response built for that complexity. Carson City Rural Child Advocacy Center provides that response.

Serving Our Communities Foundation’s role in the center goes beyond initial funding. Jan Marson served as the Executive Director and Founder for the first year of operation, with a team drawn from both the foundation and the broader advocacy community. The center served approximately 120 children during its soft opening phase and completed 44 forensic interviews in the six months following its grand opening in August 2025. As the center grows, Serving Our Communities Foundation plans to hire a permanent Executive Director, ensuring the leadership and infrastructure are in place to serve Northern Nevada’s children for years to come. 

The communities of Northern Nevada deserve to know that when a child is hurt, the systems designed to protect them are working together. That is what this center represents: a sustained, coordinated, community-rooted answer to one of the hardest challenges a region can face.

To support Carson City Rural Child Advocacy Center directly, visit ccruralcac.org.

With support from Serving Our Communities Foundation, CCRCAC continues building the infrastructure that protects Nevada’s most vulnerable children and strengthens the systems designed to serve them.