Dr. Isaac Pope visits with a child at Pope’s Place
Eden, a child at Pope’s Kids Place, looks back at the camera while a harpist from Assured Hospice performs for the kids in 2017
Kameron, a child at Pope’s Kids Place, listens as harpist Karen Monroe performs for the kids in 2017.
Former Pope’s Place board member Jim Phillips stands with Dr. Isaac Pope during construction at the Pope’s Place campus
Since Dr. Isaac Pope and his wife Jo started Pope’s Kids Place in 1995, the mission has been fueled by passion. Twenty-five years later, Pope’s Place, as it’s now called, in Centralia continues to serve children with special needs and their families.
Pope moved to the Chehalis area in 1979, opening the Chehalis Children’s Clinic around the same time. He realized there was a lack of options for respite care in the area for children with special needs.
Pope’s Place Executive Director Shirley Billings said Pope also noticed the strain the around-the-clock nature of caregiving was putting on some families.
“If you’re dealing with a child with special needs, you know, date nights, they don’t happen, or family vacations,” Billings said. “He saw where it was actually destroying the family in a lot of cases and his desire was to do something, originally, just to provide some respite for families.”
Pope also noticed the social effects on families who were caring for a child with special needs on their own.
“Those (the social problems) include, sometimes, child abuse, divorce (and) financial ruin,” Pope said. “Most of these families did not have any relief, they were 24/7.”
He continued by saying he then started working with the Lewis County health department, where a board of review was implemented for families of children with special needs to help coordinate care.
“We would have a meeting, which involved everybody that was involved in that child’s care,” Pope said. “At the end of each meeting we would ask the family, ‘what do we need to do to help you?’ Most of them were saying that ‘we need a break, because we have a child, 24/7, without any help’ and that went on for several meetings.”
Pope recalled a situation in which a woman who was taking care of a special needs child said she and her husband wanted to go on vacation to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary.
In response, Dr. Pope said he and some of the volunteer nurses who then assisted at Pope’s Kids Place came together to both pay for the woman and her husband to take a trip to the Oregon Coast for a weekend and look after their child while they were gone.
“When we saw her again, she was a different person,” Pope said. “I asked her, ‘what did you guys do?’ She said, ‘for the first 24 hours, I slept.’”
That’s where he said he derived the inspiration for the respite center. Pope’s Kids Place was incorporated and the original board was established. On that board was Jim Phillips, who also served as the Chairman of Properties for Pope’s Kids Place.
He said the amount of volunteers that worked with Pope’s Place stood out to him.
“It was just a tremendous amount of volunteers,” Phillips said. “The blessings we’ve received over the years made that organization grow and sustain itself.”
He said the impact Pope’s Place has had on the community is one of the most notable aspects of the facility’s first 25 years in existence.
“It’s been a marvelous place,” Phillips said. “In all of these 25 years-plus of my service there and helping him (Pope) put that thing (the facility) together and building that campus, I’ve totally enjoyed my time there.”
Over the years, Pope’s Place evolved from Pope, his wife and some volunteer nurses, to what it is today. Billings mentioned that, over that time, the efforts of Pope around the community extended to supporting children with Autism and helping to start the Lewis County Autism Coalition, dentistry for children with special needs, overnight and weekend respite care, pediatric group living and a pre-school.
A new building has also been built for pediatric group living, which houses 17 beds, at least three of which are used for respite care. According to Billings, Pope’s Place doesn’t make finances a barrier for families seeking respite assistance.
“If you don’t have the money to pay for respite care, we still take your child,” Billings said. “There is some money through DDA (Developmental Disabilities Administration), but not very much, so we just subsidize that. We earn money through our deal and what not to figure out ways to pay for that, because parents still need respite.”
She and Pope both added that the assistance from those around the community played a vital role in what Pope’s Place has been able to accomplish.
“We had a lot of people in this community and outside of this community that invested a lot of time to help us,” Pope said. “I didn’t do it all alone, I had a lot of help with a lot of very, very nice people.”
With the challenges presented by COVID-19, Pope’s Place is doing what it needs to do to adapt. Billings, though, mentioned the mental impact that’s starting to be felt by some of the children.
“Everybody’s been so concentrated on the physical (aspect) of this (COVID-19) that I really don’t think people are understanding the mental piece of this as well,” Billings said. “The issue that’s being created by not having any association with people, other than, in their case, a nurse everyday.”
Still, she believes the family-based approach of Pope’s Place is going to continue serving as the driving force of the operation.
Pope remains proud of everything Pope’s Place has accomplished over the last 25 years.
“The most important thing was to see some of these families regain both their mental and physical health because they had help," he said.
