Sacramento’s Child Abuse Prevention Center fights harm and neglect through education and advocacy
by M.S. Enkoji
When the Child Abuse Prevention Center chose a new leader, it found someone with a deep understanding of its mission: Someone who was in foster care mainly because her family was impoverished.
In November 2024, Janay Eustace became president and chief executive officer of the Child Abuse Prevention Center, which aims to reduce child abuse and neglect as a backbone organization of a continuum of support dedicated to education and advocacy.
“It’s an amazing opportunity to give back to my own community,” Eustace says.
The Child Abuse Prevention Center, based in Sacramento, has grown since its founding in 1977 from a local resource into a multiple-agency organization that offers training, education and research locally and statewide.
“It’s an amazing opportunity to give back to my own community.”
Janay Eustace, President and Chief Executive Officer, Child Abuse Prevention Center
A core initiative the CAP Center oversees—with backing from the Sacramento County Department of Child, Family and Adult Services (DCFAS) and First 5 Sacramento—are the Birth & Beyond Centers located within family resource centers to support those in need in nine neighborhoods.
Whether Child Protective Services (CPS) refers them or families decide to come in on their own, they can connect for free with Birth & Beyond services such as workshops on positive parenting, help with household utilities, safe-sleep practices to prevent crib deaths. Parents can learn proper car-seat use, join support groups, set up play times for their children, learn self-defense skills. Trained professionals can do home instruction to teach coping skills and offer other skill training. The family resource centers, some of which have playgrounds and activity rooms, are located in communities.
One targeted campaign reduced infant deaths by addressing how to safely put infants to sleep, such as avoiding adult beds.
Birth & Beyond centers represent a shift in Sacramento County’s investment in prevention rather than enforcement and family separation, Eustace says.
The effort is paying off. Working with parents for as little as eight hours can keep parents and their children out of CPS, the agency has found. In 2014, there were 2,073 children in foster care. By 2024, the number dropped to 1,188, a decrease of 57 percent, Eustace says.
Prevention is key, Eustace says. If her family had gotten help from something like Birth & Beyond because of the poverty her mother was facing, things would have been different, she says.
“We would have done better,” she says.
Eustace says poverty overcoming her mother was how she ended up in foster care, but her grandmother waded through a mountainous bureaucracy to make sure she was her foster parent. “She did whatever she had to do,” Eustace says.
Eustace was able to keep herself on track, volunteering as early as 14 to help others and even partnering with CPS while in the system. She grew to understand how she could help others avoid what broke up her family. She went on to college and got a master’s degree. She worked for CPS in Sacramento, then as executive director of California Youth Connection, advocating for positive transformation to the foster care system. All of this prepared her for her work at the CAP Center—empowering communities to prevent families from experiencing foster care.
And on a personal note, her mother also survived her circumstances to become what Eustace calls “an amazing grandmother.”
More information about the Child Abuse Prevention Center can be found at https://www.thecapcenter.org/. For information about other resources, visit the Sacramento County Department of Child, Family and Adult Services website at dcfas.saccounty.net/.
