With construction on the Pavilion for Child and Adolescent Health wing at the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center progressing, a recent grant from Inland Empire Community Foundation (IECF) is as timely as it is beneficial.
The IECF grant via the Arthur L. Jacobson Donor Advised Fund will filter into the established capital campaign for the new center.
Ground broke on the new facility late last year. It will house new examination rooms as the center and the Riverside County Coalition to End Human Trafficking further extend their services for child abuse victims.
“The new facility will be set up for identification of potential child abuse,” said John Thoresen, Director and Executive Officer of Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center, located on the Eisenhower Medical Center campus in Rancho Mirage. “That’s done either with forensic interviews or medical exams. As forensic medical exams go, we’re now doing 30 a month.”
Documenting abuse victims is vital, he added. “The only way we could document those victims is to bring them back for a revisit. The forensic pediatricians and forensic nurse practitioners doing the medical exams have to get that report to law enforcement as soon as possible. They can’t really document other medical issues.”
The new pavilion for child and adolescent health is one part of a campaign that received crucial donations.
Equally important at the center is a new research fellowship that the organization endows at the University of California, Riverside, to conduct more research on child abuse prevention and awareness.
“The third key element related to our work is relative to prevention,” Thoresen said. “We’ve developed a series of animated videos on child abuse prevention that are shown around the world. There are almost a billion views on YouTube. They’ve been translated into various languages and they’re shown throughout schools.”
One of the things that the campaign also allowed for was funding for a new national marketing person. Thoresen said the role is significant because it will assist with the center’s curriculum and getting videos into more state schools and school superintendents’ offices.
Overall, he sees these new endeavors as “very exciting” in terms of the impact it can make.
Collectively, these are yet another series of significant steps, in a series of long and impactful ones, that continue making the center an empowering resource.
Founded in 1986 by Barbara and Frank Sinatra, the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center had a clear mission from the beginning: to be dedicated to ensuring “every child’s right to a normal, healthy and secure childhood.”
The center rose in the spotlight, quickly commended for its individual, group, and family therapies. Special programs that addressed issues tied to children’s suffering, and the effects of child neglect and abuse—and even those at risk to be abused—factored into the center’s work.
More than 80 percent of children counseled come from families below the national poverty line for a family of four.
“I don’t know if people really recognize the fact that when the Sinatras started this organization, they did so to cover the full range of activity around the issue of child abuse,” Thoreson said. “A lot of people recognize that we have a wonderful team of therapists and psychiatrists who deal with the treatment of abuse. And we have done that for almost 40 years and seen 25,000 kids.
“What’s important to note, too, is that we’re really the organization that investigates or quantifies the potentials of abuse that has occurred through very highly qualified pediatric forensic interviewers, forensic pediatricians, and nurse practitioners,” he added. “The Sinatras really wanted to work on prevention and awareness.”
As the organization expanded its reach, things shifted in 2017. Thoresen said the center modified its mission and basically went “global” it its prevention and awareness efforts.
“That’s when we started constructing the animated videos and the curriculum,” he said. “That curriculum and the videos are in schools in 15,000 cities across the United States now.”
Thoresen encourages Valley residents to visit fightchildabuse.org (or the center’s website) to experience those videos first-hand.
The Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center worked in conjunction with Wonder Media and the Joshua Center on Child Sexual Abuse at the University of Washington to develop a strong global campaign on child abuse awareness and prevention. Child advocates, therapists, and national scholars are the brainchild of the unique program, whose reach continues to stretch far and wide.
Learn more at barbarasinatrachildrenscenter.org.
This story originally appeared in the Desert Sun, October 2025.
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