Introduction

My name is Marissa Vestal and I am currently serving as a victim

advocacy intern at Stepping Stone Child Advocacy and Sexual Assault Center.

Stepping Stone was created in 1999 by a group of concerned citizens who were

members of Prevent Child Abuse Georgia, that started Prevent Child Abuse

Laurens County. Child Advocacy Centers, in general, were a new concept in

1999 and had only been around for about 10 years at the time. The first child

advocacy center was started in the 1980s in Alabama, and quickly these centers

started being founded across the United States as the need was found

nationally. These concerned citizens saw the benefit of child advocacy centers

and decided that they would go through the process of becoming recognized by

the National Children’s Advocacy Center, and Child Advocacy Centers of

Georgia. They applied as a temporary member, and then met the capacity to

become a full, standards meeting member in 2000.

The goal of child advocacy centers is to create a safe and welcoming

place that children can come to when they are a victim of a crime to tell their

story and feel supported. They are meant to keep children out of intimidating

police offices and to conduct non-leading, forensic interviews so that the child

does not have to continue to retell their story to each party involved in their

case. As a dual child advocacy and sexual assault center, Stepping Stone has the

unique privilege to serve and advocate for both child and adult victims of
sexual crimes and envisions a world where every child and adult flourishes free

from abuse, harm, and neglect.

Currently, on staff at Stepping Stone, we have our Executive Director

Brooke Woods, who has been serving our center since 2012, our Sexual Assault

Nurse Examiner Anthea Poulton, Client Services Coordinator Emily

Brookshire, Victim Advocacy Specialist Macie LaFavor, Counselor and MSW

Courtney Lamb, and Psychologist Dr. Curtis Holmes. Additionally, we also have

on-call staff who assist us in our 24/7 crisis services. Stepping Stone serves the

10 counties that make up the Dublin and Oconee Judicial Circuits, which

include Bleckley, Dodge, Johnson, Laurens, Montgomery, Pulaski, Telfair,

Treutlen, Twiggs, and Wheeler counties.

Description of Experience

As an intern, I performed a variety of tasks which primarily involved

performing advocacy tasks with clients, inputting client information to case

management software, preparing billing, and creating marketing materials. I

really enjoyed all of the aspects of my internship, from the most mundane to

the most rewarding. I think some of the most rewarding portions of my

internship were seeing my vision or creation come to life as something that

will be used at Stepping Stone for years to come. My design for our road sign in

front of the center, my re-branded brochures, and the design for the new

intake room were all such exciting and rewarding projects that I go to do
almost entirely on my own. I think some of the most challenging work is trying

to follow up with referrals as well as providing advocacy for cases that are

highly emotional. It is always hard to provide advocacy for a parent who is

somewhat blaming their child for what happened to them or to sit and wait on

other entities to call you back when you know that your client needs to receive

services as soon as possible. Each part is uniquely frustrating, but when you

have a breakthrough with a parent or finally get a client referred to the perfect

provider, they can also be uniquely rewarding. I wish that I could have done

more shadowing work with our counselor, Courtney. She has been on

maternity leave as she just had her first baby in January, so it just so happened

that the timing wasn’t great. I am looking forward to shadowing her and

learning from her regarding therapeutic techniques and psychological

evaluations over the last month of my internship though, as she is back in the

office starting April 1st.

Perception and Evaluation of Internship

This internship has exceeded my personal expectations. I feel like I have

grown exponentially both professionally and personally in this role. Working

at Stepping Stone has illuminated my passion for child advocacy, and gave me

a feeling of direction for my career that I was lacking before starting this

internship. Additionally, I have gained so many skills that are important for

office work, like the importance of taking notes when you answer the phone, as
well as general phone etiquette and efficiency skills, which is just something

we can’t learn in a classroom.

Stepping Stone was absolutely open to my ideas and contributions. I

think that they often took my opinion into consideration when making

changes, as well as for future additions that we make to our practice. From my

suggestion to switch from paper intake forms to using an iPad, to my

perspective on certain cases and their connection to teenagers being exposed

to extreme sexual content on the internet. Brooke has even told me that my

input has been invaluable to the law enforcement officers in understanding

cases on a deeper level.

Brooke and Emily as a team were fantastic supervisors. I felt like I was

always learning from them and getting both positive and constructive

feedback. They were the perfect first bosses for me in my field. I really don’t

feel like my internship experience could have been any better. I would

absolutely recommend Stepping Stone to future interns, especially those who

are interested in the intersection of public health and social services. I really

felt like I became part of the team even as a temporary intern, and there was so

much I was able to do that was hands-on, and felt like I was really making a

difference.
 Internship Preparedness

I do feel that I was prepared academically for this internship. The classes

that I feel prepared me the most for this work were Intro to Public Health,

Methods of Health Promotion, and Public Health Policy and Systems. Those

courses gave us many real-life examples of how our skills and knowledge is

used in the field, as well as useful knowledge that I use every day, like the

determinants of health, socio-economic factors that affect our clients, and the

most effective ways to spread information and initiate behavior change. I

would love to see the School of Health and Human Performance add some

social services-based classes or collaborate with the College of Arts and

Sciences to have some psychology classes be cross-listed to count towards our

degrees as public health students. I think that as the program grows, having

options for students who are interested in social services and public health

advocacy would be fantastic. Additionally, I think it would be extremely

beneficial for public health majors to be required to take a sociology class. In

our internships and careers, we as public health professionals come into

contact with people from all walks of life and diverse backgrounds. I am of the

strong belief that public health majors need to have a sociology class so that

they have at least an introduction to social systems and stratifications before

going out into the real world. Race and class structures are inextricably linked
to health status, and I think it would be a disservice to not collaborate with the

sociology department to educate future public health professionals.

Internship Performance

As I mentioned above, I think that I gained a lot of experience in

professionalism through my internship. I feel that I have become significantly

better at professional emailing, taking phone calls and messages, and

communicating with multiple parties about an event or meeting. Additionally,

I feel that I have learned a lot about how to navigate conversations with people

of different political or other ideological beliefs with grace. Sometimes the

things that people say in rural, mostly white areas like Dublin can be shocking

or offensive, but navigating conversations to provide the best service despite

someone’s beliefs is a true skill and one that I feel I have honed during my

internship.

I have been satisfied with the quality of my performance on all of my

deliverables thus far for my internship. Despite being late on some of my

discussion posts, I think that I have created high-quality work for this

internship as well as been very good at time management. I have been working

on my project since I started, so I don’t feel overwhelmed at all now that

deadlines are coming up.

I still feel that I need to sharpen my phone skills after graduation.

Answering phones gives me anxiety, but I know that it is a vital part of most
jobs, so I think that I need to work on being more comfortable with that part of

the job. Additionally, I am looking forward to further developing my advocacy

and therapeutic skills through my graduate program, and really sharpening

those skills for when I do this work in my career.

Personal/Professional Insights/Benefits

This internship has heavily impacted my personal, professional, and

academic goals. Before this semester started I was feeling a bit lost, not sure

what direction I wanted to go in after graduation. After doing this internship, I

am sure that child advocacy is the space that I want to build my career in. In

pursuing my MSW, I plan to do as much as I can to prepare myself

professionally for this field, including learning about trauma therapy and

hopefully getting trained to conduct forensic interviews. Eventually, I hope to

one day be an executive director of a child advocacy center, and I feel I have a

fantastic role model for my career trajectory in Brooke. I love working with

children and teens, which I have confirmed through this internship, so I am

excited to learn more about how to work with them in through evidence-based

practice in graduate school. I know that this career path will not be easy, it will

be emotionally taxing and will require me to wear many hats at the same time,

but my internship has shown me that I enjoy this kind of environment and that

I am able to find hope in the darkness we encounter each day.