CASEY GWINN: From very young I wanted to do something that would make a difference in the world. I became the Child Abuse/Domestic Violence Prosecutor in San Diego. We had figured out by '89 that victims were going from place to place to place to place to place to get help. And when we sat down with survivors in the shelter, they all said, "I wish I could go one place to tell my story once." And so we proposed it. Cops, prosecutors, advocates, doctors, nurses, therapists, chaplains, all under one roof.
We built this team that we didn't call a Family Justice Center. It was just seven agencies, but it was the beginning of what we call "The Power of We." It worked. We started seeing homicides start to decline in San Diego. We started getting a lot of national attention. And then in 1996, as soon as I got elected City Attorney, I said, I want to plan the San Diego Family Justice Center. I want to create this center—first one in America—where everybody can go one place for everything. We opened on October 10th of 2002. Twenty-five agencies, one place where victims could go. So it wasn't just about domestic violence. Now it was about all the intersections of trauma that we were focused on.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: San Diego figured it out. They've got a City Attorney named Casey Gwinn. He's right there. He created the San Diego Family Justice Center. The runaround is over in San Diego. There's a central location where somebody who desperately needs help can find compassion and help.
CASEY GWINN: And the President announced the President's Family Justice Center Initiative and said, "We're going to create these centers all over America." We have centers now in 25 countries. We have centers in 40 states in the United States. We had created Alliance for HOPE International. Somebody helping a child go... Camp HOPE became part of the Family Justice Center.
We produced our Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention. And then we realized the number one need in Family Justice Centers was civil legal services, so we started our Justice Legal Network. It was fun to see the kids see the science of hope, hear the science of hope, and actually, I think, get it. We're creating a community of hope here. This is about all of us who believe that hope can rise in our lives.
