One of the first clues that the building in Norton that housed Family Crisis Support Services had serious foundation issues came one day when Executive Director Marybeth Matthews-Adkins and her staff were eating lunch. One of the employees got up from a chair, and they watched it roll across the floor.
She didn’t worry too much about it at the time, though. It was late February or early March 2020 — just when the world was beginning to realize the seriousness of COVID-19.
But then the indicators that there were problems began to pile up.
Marybeth Matthews-Adkins, executive director of Family Crisis Support Services. Photo by Susan Cameron.
After the 40-year-old carpet was replaced, Matthews-Adkins realized that the floors were dropping and pulling away from the baseboards. Then she noticed that the refrigerator was sitting at an angle, the stairwell had shifted and a large river rat from a nearby creek had burrowed up into the basement and built a sizable nest.
The building on Kentucky Avenue, once home to a coal mining office and then an engineering company, had been the agency’s offices and men’s shelter since 1986. The agency helps victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, trafficking, homelessness and other issues in five counties in the coalfields of Southwest Virginia.
So the director called the city’s building inspectors and was referred to an engineer, who found that all the building’s foundations were deteriorating. The building was deemed to be in “infrastructure failure,” she said.
The first recommendation was that she alleviate weight from the third floor, which was the top floor, where the offices were each shared by three or four employees. So she moved half of her staff, which totals about 40, to a rental office.
She began to look for a long-term solution. She explored the idea of refurbishing the building or buying adjacent property, but there was a zoning issue and she said it would cost too much to try to fix the old building.
So she decided to look for another site that would allow for expansion. Bigger and better facilities were needed because over the last five years, there has been a 76% increase in the number of domestic violence and sexual assault victims served by the agency, and a 54% jump in the number dealing with homelessness, according to Matthews-Adkins.
Some of the need stems from the pandemic, but that’s not the whole story. She said since she’s been director, she has witnessed a slow, steady increase in the number of people who need help.
On Wednesday — more than three years later — she and her staff will unveil the $4.2 million Family Crisis Resource Center, a six-building campus built in Wise County near Norton on more than 30 acres of former coal mine land with plenty of room for expansion. There are five large manufactured homes that together can house as many as 76 men, women and children in need of emergency shelter, along with a large center that will bring employees together and allow them to offer a number of services under one roof.
An increasing need
In its more than 40 years, the agency has provided help to 313,425 individuals and families in an area where life is difficult for many, said Matthews-Adkins.
It covers Lee, Scott, Wise, Dickenson, Buchanan and Russell counties, which is an area plagued by poverty and considered by many to be an epicenter of the opioid abuse crisis of recent years.
Also greatly affecting the region has been the downturn of the coal industry, which provided good-paying jobs and stability to many of its residents for generations, she added.
The work done by the agency was started in 1982 by two nuns from New York, Sisters Beth Jeffers and Margaret Flynn, who helped people when they saw a need through their organization, the Advocate Center. Their health began to fail around 2014, and Matthews-Adkins, who had been running another regional social services agency, Family Crisis Support Services, stepped in. She said she went to the Advocate Center’s board and was given approval to take over their phone calls requesting help. The work eventually came under the umbrella of Family Crisis Support Services, she said.
The sisters moved back to New York and are now both deceased, according to Matthews-Adkins.
On Jan. 1, she will celebrate her 13th anniversary as director of the agency. Before that, she was a teacher in the Wise County school system who saw that her students were affected by problems at home, and she wanted to do more to help them.
She went to work with the Department of Social Services in child protective services. But she often found herself having to remove children from their homes for their own safety and again, she wanted to do more.
“I wasn’t touching the problem of keeping families together and getting them the resources they needed … without disrupting a child’s life and separating them from their families,” she said.
The job took its toll, so she applied for the director’s position at Family Crisis Support Services and was hired.
At that time, the agency had a $379,000 budget. Today, the spending plan totals more than $6 million and the majority goes to direct services for local residents in need, she said.
A generational approach
Matthews-Adkins and her staff mainly work with victims and their families, and she’s been in it long enough now to see that patterns such as violence repeat themselves as children and adolescents get older and perpetuate the cycle.
Her dream has been to take a “generational approach” to helping families, with a focus on the children. The children of families in crisis are often ripped from their home, separated from a parent, taken out of their school and away from their teachers and friends. It is a traumatic time for them.
She wants to take away some of the pain. One way is to make sure the family pet is safely boarded so the child knows they won’t also lose the animal. Many times, people will remain in a bad situation, go homeless or live in a car before they will give up their pet, she said.
Families dealing with domestic violence and the victims of sexual assault need more help than others because it takes time for them to heal. Normally, the agency is involved with them for as long as a year or two, she said.
Matthews-Adkins grew up in Sandusky, Ohio, but she has family and educational ties to Southwest Virginia. Her father was from St. Paul, where her grandparents lived until their deaths. She went to the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, got married after graduation and raised her two kids here.
She was close to her grandparents, J. Fred Matthews and Eleanor Matthews, and when her grandmother died, she left the family home to the agency. Today, it houses women and children as they recover. They can stay as long as needed, she said.
“My grandparents were special, giving people. So that house means a lot to me. And I have seen people stay there and move on into their own permanent home and they’ve succeeded, and the kids are thriving. They just needed longer to heal and just the opportunity of having that house has been huge,” she said.
‘It shows up’
Once Matthews-Adkins decided she was going to find another home for the agency, she had to figure out a way to pay for it.
But she is a woman of faith.
“I think things happen for a reason. We could literally be down to our last loaf of bread and have zero money in our accounts to go out and buy another loaf of bread. And it shows up. I’ve been doing this for more than 12 years, and it just shows up,” she said.
She began reaching out to agencies such as Virginia Housing, which put her in touch with Randy Grumbine, executive director of the Virginia Manufactured and Modular Housing Association.
Grumbine knew about some large manufactured homes that were meant to provide housing during COVID at the University of Richmond, where they were parked and not being used.
The university ended up giving the homes to the agency. Matthews-Adkins got busy and wrote a successful grant to pay for moving them over the mountains to Wise County.
The units arrived before she had a site. She contacted a local businessman, Wendell Barnette, who helped her find 30 acres of reclaimed mine land off Industrial Park Road that offered plenty of room for future expansion.
He reduced the cost of the land and Matthews-Adkins applied for another grant.
By this time, she realized that the project was taking all her time. She felt she wasn’t good at it, and she missed working more closely with her staff and clients. She began looking around for help.
She went to an alumni event at UVA Wise that was also attended by Michael Wampler, who said he hadn’t been to the event in years and almost didn’t make it. Matthews-Adkins ended up talking to his wife, Teresa, about her need for a project manager, and she told Matthews-Adkins that her husband could do it.
Wampler had held a variety of jobs working for county governments and private businesses that seemed to qualify him for the position. After he and Matthews-Adkins talked for a couple of months, he joined the agency in August 2022 as program development administrator and project manager of the agency’s new resource center.
Since the property had no water, sewer or electricity, those services had to be added before construction could begin on the 4,000-square-foot center, which houses offices for the staff, a meeting room and a kitchen. The center will allow clients to work with the staff and apply for services, aid or a job in one building, which will alleviate the need for transportation.
The modern center is surrounded by five large homes, each with 10 small bedrooms, four bathrooms, a kitchen and dining/gathering area.
Last Thursday, the new center was busy with construction workers putting the finishing touches on the building while furniture was being delivered.
The new campus and center would never have happened without help and donations from a host of organizations, major funders and community support, Matthews-Adkins said. They include the Secular Society, which provided $1.5 million and was the largest funding partner.
[Disclosure: The Secular Society is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.]
In addition to the University of Richmond, the other agencies that helped were the LENOWISCO Planning District Commission, the Virginia Department of Housing, Sentara Health, the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice, the Virginia Department of Social Services, United Healthcare, Anthem, the Rapha Foundation, the Truist Foundation and Speedway Children’s Charities.
Matthews-Adkins and Wampler said they are excited about the unveiling and what the center will mean for the staff and those helped by the agency.
“The unveiling still feels surreal,” Matthews-Adkins said. “We have always made do with what we have as long as individuals received the services needed, regardless of our building or lack of space. I think what I’m looking forward to the most is the awareness of the services we provide for those who don’t know. I look forward to my staff being able to work in these new and safer conditions.”
The pair are already planning a second phase that will include a large supply warehouse that will house a commercial laundry, a food pantry with cooking space, a storage area for items like mattresses and a separate building for child care. They would also like to provide behavioral health counseling, mental health services, mobile medical services, emergency pet kennel storage, a playground compliant with Americans with Disabilities standards and a thrift store.
The target date for completion of the second phase is spring 2025. It is expected to cost about $2 million.
To donate to Family Crisis Support Services or to learn more about its services, visit www.family-crisis.org and click on the donate button at the top right. The agency also always needs perishable items like bread and milk.
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Correction 11:30 a.m. Dec. 13: The initial connection between Marybeth Matthews-Adkins and the Virginia Manufactured and Modular Housing Association came through Virginia Housing, and the buildings that were donated were manufactured, not modular, homes. These details were incorrect in an earlier version of this story.
