Aviva believes every child and every family in our Los Angeles community deserves the chance for a brighter future. We provide compassionate support, therapeutic services, and guidance to at-risk children and families.
Our Clients, Our Communities
For Angeleno children and families whose needs are underestimated and unmet, Aviva provides the care they need. We help families and children (ages birth to 21), the overwhelming majority of whom come from homes well below the federal poverty level. While no two circumstances are alike, Aviva’s clients face multiple sources of disadvantage, discrimination and marginalization including:
- Poverty
- Food insecurity
- Homelessness
- Mental health issues
- Substance dependence
- Physical, sexual, emotional neglect/abuse
- Exposure to violent environments
- Limited access to healthcare
- Commercial sexual exploitation
- Involvement with the juvenile justice system
- Discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation and disabilities
Aviva’s programs mitigate social, emotional, and economic barriers and disrupt pernicious cycles of neglect and abuse for greater health, security and stability. We help to build stronger, more cohesive families for resilience and permanency.
Our Services
We are a nonprofit, non-sectarian 501(c)(3) organization. Our work is based on a foundation of integrity, transformation, collaboration and compassion. We provide a continuum of care with direct services across four main program areas:
Mental Health Services – Meeting mental health needs of children and families in their own environment through collaboration between client, family and Aviva’s professional staff.
Intensive Community Based Services – Intensive community based services provided by multidisciplinary teams who employ a strength-based approach that empowers families to lead in their own treatment and stabilizes the home environment so families can remain together.
Foster & Adoption Program – Integrated programming to secure safe, loving homes for children (from birth to age 21) in Los Angeles County, treatment for children who are high-risk/high-need, Relative Support Services and Relative Home Assessment Services.
Interim Supportive Housing Program for Women and Children – Wallis House, Aviva’s residential program for unhoused women and children offers interim housing, food, essential resources, therapeutic care and case management. Wallis House provides a home and hope with a tapestry of services and vital resources to our residents and their families.
Founding Purpose, Deep Roots – 108 Years & Still Thriving
Since Aviva’s founding in 1915 when our namesakes, Asher and Hannah Hamburger, collaborated with a core group of local merchants and pioneer philanthropists, including the Macy family, to establish the Ida Strauss Day Nursery and Settlement, Aviva has grown exponentially. The nursery provided daycare to children of working widows and mothers, and later, arranged for adoptions of WWI orphans.
In the more than 108 years that have passed, Aviva has flourished based on our ability to evolve and to respond to our clients’ urgent and the most pervasive issues in our communities. While programs, facilities and partnerships have evolved to meet the moment, women, children, and families in Los Angeles communities with the greatest need and who are without access to adequate resources have remained central to our mission.
A highlight in Aviva’s history includes the 1955 purchase of our historic residential property in Hollywood, originally named Hamburger Home in tribute to our legacy benefactors. The stately home which continues to house Aviva’s residential program is now known as Wallis House, in honor of a more recent Aviva benefactor, local philanthropist Wallis Annenberg.
Hamburger Home remains our legal name, but today we do business as Aviva Family and Children’s Services (Aviva) to reflect our broad range of services from prevention, intervention to intensive treatment. For the arc of Aviva’s evolution and notable moments in our organization’s history read Hamburger Home to Aviva – Renewal, Resilience, Healing & Hope 2023.
(updated October 2023)