Diane Connell finds abuse can be a touchy subject

The Children's Advocacy Center Director of Development Diane Connell said people often just don't want to hear it - that children are abused in Lee County.

FLORIDA WEEKLY PHOTO / EVAN WILLIAMS Diane Connell "It's somewhat challenging, because unlike other non-profits, they don't wanna hear about child abuse," she said. "They don't wanna hear about what's going on. People turn away from this issue because they see it as negative."

She said marketing the issue of child abuse care - getting people not to turn away from it - is one of the most challenging parts of her job. Currently, that means raising money for a new building to help those kids (3,600 of them last year) who end up broken, bloodied, bruised, neglected, witness to violent crimes or sometimes even raped by their adult counterparts.

"Basically I'm charged with raising money for the organization and marketing the organization in the community and working with volunteers," she said. "Right now, we've just launched a capitol campaign to raise money for the (renovation of) the building we've just purchased."

Applying for grants, meeting with possible donors and promoting the Center take up most of her time Connell said; but the first thing she does in the morning is check her e-mail. Before coming to the Children's Advocacy Center in January 2008, Connell was CEO at Big Brothers Big Sisters, another non-profit, which matches children with adult mentors.

Before that Connell earned her bachelor's in business at Indiana University, moved to Chicago and took a job at a bank. After 16 weeks of training she landed in the Audit Department.

"That was my first real job," she said.

It came after a childhood which swung Connell from the Midwest to the East Coast and back again.

She was born in Dayton, Ohio 44 years ago and moved to the Boston suburbs at age 7, then to New York the next year. She lived in Chappaqua, N.Y., the community where Bill and Hillary Clinton have a home now.

"At the time when I lived there it was an affluent community," she said.

Connell said she remembers there being a lot of IBM executives who commuted to Manhattan. When she was 15, Connell moved back to Chicago's North Shore - the area where "Risky Business" was filmed. It was also the home of characters in other movies from the 1980s like "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," "Sixteen Candles" and "The Breakfast Club."

"I still have some of those movies," she said. "…I loved Chicago, it was a wonderful city. In New York, I was just too young to appreciate everything."

After leaving her job at the bank, and getting married, she went back to school at Northwestern University to earn an MBA. By that time her parents and older sister had relocated to Fort Myers, near where they vacationed as youths, on Sanibel Island.

Connell and her husband purchased a home in Cape Coral in 1990.

"It was kind of a shock to come down here in a number of ways," she said. "When you're living in the city you have access to a lot of different things…hunting for jobs we quickly learned we wouldn't make as much money."

She started out working for Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council (doing land use and transportation planning).

"Just before I joined that organization I got a grant to do economic development work," Connell said.

She helped some of the poorest, rural areas in the state - such as Labelle, Moore Haven and Immokalee - develop infrastructure such as roads and sewers.

After that she entered the world of nonprofits, going from United Way, to the Southwest Florida Community Foundation (where she worked in a marketing role similar to her current job), then to Big Brothers Big Sisters.

Now she's helping the Children's Advocacy Center expand.

"Space wise, we've run out of room," she said. The new building, four blocks away on Evans Avenue kitty corner to the Southwest Florida Regional Hospital - will be 20,000 square feet. That's 7,000 square feet bigger than the current one, which is 12 years old, with worn out carpet, low ceilings and small, stark offices which therapy groups often get crowded into.

The Center needs $3.5 million to pay for and renovate the new building. She has already secured major commitments from Chico's, the Sun Coast Federal Credit Union Foundation and Fort Myers gated communities such as Fiddlesticks and Gulf Harbor, as well as some anonymous donations.

Connell usually contacts possible donors indirectly.

"If you were a business person in the community, I would ask someone who knows you to set up a meeting," she said. "Gifts so far have largely been based on one-to-one meetings like that and using relationships that they already have to be able to talk to them."

The new building will include extra medical examination rooms. Also interview areas, which are decorated like family rooms, to accommodate the sensitive nature of questioning brutalized children (by law they can only be interviewed only three times).

"The only thing to a child that might seem out of place is there's a camera mounted in the corner," she said. But they tell the children what it's for, so there are no surprises.

But some might be surprised to learn that Florida far exceeds the National average for child abuse - every eight minutes, two children are abused in the state. The Children's Advocacy is a crises center that works with sexually and physically abused children and is designed to be a safe and friendly place for them to come and be heard and help them get on the road to recovery.

If you or your organization would like to donate funds or get involved by volunteering, contact Diane Connell at (239) 939-2808 or Dconnell@cac-swfl.org.