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Youth Villages in Morristown has newly renovated offices and took a moment to celebrate on Monday the space inside the Millennium Square Building on W. First North Street.

The organization does community-based services that support at-risk children and families which includes counseling and foster care support. The renovation gives a better opportunity for their staff to meet in larger groups to train or organize for better client care.

“This new office space is phenomenal; before (the renovation) it felt like every staff member couldn’t be in here at one time, and now that’s possible,” YV Assistant Director Tara Hinson said. “It’s a huge improvement. And while we still don’t have a desk for everybody, there’s places for everyone to sit.”

Everybody on staff in the building at the same time is not something that happens very often at Youth Villages — their various team members are frequently in the field — but now their space is not limiting.

“We are so excited to have everybody back in the office (after extended absences),” Hinson said.

YV Managing Director for East Tennessee Programs Betsy Lambert spoke to the gathered employees and supporters from the Morristown Area Chamber of Commerce.

“There’s over 70 staff that work out of this office,” Lambert said. “Everything here we do is community-based, so we are working out in the community. But we do intensive in-home services, working with children and families that are at risk of being removed from the home. Or we talk to people in the foster care system or elsewhere and are transitioning back.

So we want to help them be able to kind of stabilize. We also do therapeutic foster care. We have trainers, recruiters that go out and recruit families to be foster parents.

And then we are a private provider for the Department of Children’s Services. So children that go into state custody, we then help try to provide and match homes, whether it be just a home until they can get back to their caregivers or if they need a pre-adopted home, being able to find that. And then for those young adults that are aging out of the foster care system, we provide our Lifeset and Bright Futures (programming).”

Lambert said Youth Villages is continuing to work to support state initiatives for young adults transitioning out of foster care and that recent legislation has provided support for them up to age 23.

After speaking with the crowd in the new office, a great, big red ribbon was cut to mark the occasion in the space.