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APRIL 2005

Interview with Dr. Kerby Alvy

By Nazneen Malik

Dr. Kerby Alvy, Founder and Executive Director of the Center for the Improvement of Child Caring (CICC), an organization dedicated to helping children through effective parenting, fell in love with children when he was just a child himself. The youngest of five siblings, Alvy became an uncle at age nine and soon discovered that he enjoyed being in the presence of “littler people.” This realization has been the underlying motivation behind the choices he has made throughout his life; and his love of children continues to fuel his ambitions towards increasing the size and scope of community and national involvement in his parenting programs.

As an undergradutate at UCLA, Alvy majored in political science with the intention of pursuing law; however, when he graduated, he was unsure about which professional path to tread. He had gained much experience working with children as a coach at the YMCA and felt a natural ease when dealing with them. This facility prompted him to accept a position as a probation counselor at juvenile hall in Los Angeles. “This was the first time I came into contact with children who were seriously abused and neglected. Some were waiting to go to mental institutions, or the youth authority. These were kids that the community had failed,” says Dr. Alvy. He was surprised to find young children around the ages of six and seven among the crowd. “It was a very bracing experience, and it started to orient me towards working with these kids, and I was very good at it,” he admits.

Giving up a promotion within the Probation Department, Alvy decided he needed more training to deal with the problems he was encountering. At 23, he went back to college for a second undergraduate degree—this time in psychology. He eventually obtained admission into a doctoral program at The State University of New York at Albany and received the first Ph.D. in clinical psychology that the university had ever offered.

“After I got my doctorate I had an opportunity to work in a lot of institutions in LA,” says Alvy, “I had a very strong commitment to social justice.”

As the Head of Childrens’ Services at the Kedren Community Mental Health Center in south LA, Alvy had the opportunity and the means to develop his ideas about how to rectify and prevent childhood abuse and neglect. At the Center he conducted family therapy and realized that the root cause of most of the problems families were having was communication. Parents failed to show adequate appreciation of their children when they did something good. “That is when I started to get interested in parent training,” says Alvy.

Alvy applied for and received a grant for the community mental health center to train people in the community to become child-parent mental health workers. “We started training parents and at the same time I realized that the training of parents is not supported as the maor part of any institution in our society like in the mental health center it’s an adjunctive or an outreach service it’s not an essential service and in education it’s nested under adult education. In other programs it was never a priority and that’s when it dawned on me that some institution had to stand for the training and education of parents as the best way to help kids.”

With help from his brother and like-minded psychologists, Alvy began to develop what would eventually become the CICC.#

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