About Guardians of Hope

TO GUARDIANS OF HOPE

“Helping children maintain hope for their family.”

We at Guardians of Hope provide private supervision for visiting parents, and in some cases, grandparents. The majority of our cases involve allegations of family and/or domestic violence, physical or sexual abuse and for parents with alcohol or drug issues. We provide daily, overnight and extended visitations along with bilingual supervisors for cases that are in need of this service.

We provide supervised visits for estranged parents or those absent from the child’s life for some reason and the court feels the child needs time to establish a relationship with the absent parent.

We handle safe exchanges when the parents are not able to be civil enough to do so or one parent is aggressive toward the other in some manner.

We have individuals on our team that can perform home studies, therapeutic visitation and provide a Sex Offender Treatment Program.

Generally, a Judge or an attorney refers our clients to us. In some cases, another supervisor recommends us or a parent gets our name from the Attorney General’s website or from the Supervised Visitation Network.

Once we are contacted, we fill out an intake form and request copies of the legal documentation involved. We provide both parties with a copy of the “Visitation Guidelines”, one set is for the residential parent and the other is for the visiting parent and a fee schedule. These documents are to be initialed, signed and returned to Guardians of Hope. In most cases, the visiting parent pays our fees, some cases the residential parent pays and, occasionally both parties are court-ordered to each pay half.

We interview the parents generally by phone, get background information, and their feelings on the situation. We go over our guidelines with them and answer any questions regarding our guidelines or our fees.

The next step is to schedule the first visit our supervisors will arrive 15 to 30 minutes early in order to get to know the child and help the child feel at ease.

Photo: Family

We normally do not transfer due to the liability factor. However, we have been requested to transport children by the court ordered therapist to their office and will do so with a signed release of liability from the residential parent. We go just about anywhere the child and parent would like to go; such as, the visiting parent’s home, the mall, movies, skating, bowling, sports events, picnics, church, etc. We normally stay away from visits where swimming or water parks are involved especially when there have been allegations of sexual abuse.

Our main interest is the child; we try to maintain a neutral attitude toward both parents. We treat the visiting parent with respect because we know that these children love their parents and we want them to feel secure with us. We feel that if we act in a negative manner toward the supervised parent we could hurt our relationship with the child and establishing a feeling of safety and trust with the child is paramount to us.

We generate reports about the visits and will submit them to the attorneys of record when requested prior to a hearing with fifteen-business days written notice or requested by subpoena. We do not give our reports to any of the parties involved in the suit. Guardians of Hope will make our reports accessible to the ad litem, amicus or therapist of record when requested in writing.

We are members of the Supervised Visitation Network, a worldwide organization of service providers and the Texas Supervised Visitation Network. These organizations provide the availability of continuing education, conferences and networking.

This is a brief description of our services together with some information about our organization. We strive to provide the best visit possible for the children we work with, and as we all know, they are the victims of these situations.

Please feel free to call if you have any questions or to request additional information.