A confident young woman with a compassionate intelligence, Allison Perry appears destined for great things.

But it wasn’t always this way for Perry, the guest speaker during a Voices for Kids event at Suffolk’s downtown Hilton Garden Inn Wednesday.

The group provides judge-appointed volunteers to represent the interests of children in court, and there was a time when Perry’s life was turned around by one of these individuals.

When her sister went to college and her father left the family home, the Chesapeake native was left to cope alone with a mentally ill mother who abused alcohol and prescription drugs, she told invited guests at the program’s ninth annual volunteer banquet.

“Every time I would go into the kitchen, she would get flustered and push me away,” Perry recalled.

Frightened by the disintegration of her family, Perry grew determined to keep it from the outside world.

“During this time I was self-disciplined,” she said. “I learned to clean the home, I always did my homework.”

The 10 or 20 pills her mother would take “to help herself get through whatever she was going through … really should have killed her,” Perry said. “There were days that she didn’t get out of bed.”

The façade of normality Perry had painstakingly built up came “crashing down” one day when she climbed off the school bus to find first-responder vehicles parked outside the house.

“I knew my life was never going to be the same,” she said. “I knew she wouldn’t be alive and I knew I would be going into foster care.”

Choking back tears, Perry told banquet guests nothing more about what had occurred that day. But she described how a court-appointed special advocate helped her tear down the walls and turn her life around.

“She just got to know me as an individual,” Perry said. “She asked me what my favorite kind of music was, and I got to tell her about Britney Spears, which was awesome.

“She told me secrets will eat you alive, from the inside out, and the only way to get help is to tell someone.”

The Virginia Commonwealth University graduate started down the path to becoming a court-appointed special advocate in January 2011, while interning at the Virginia General Assembly.

She completed the program in April 2011, becoming a CASA for the city of Richmond.

“Everything God put into my life was for me to serve a higher purpose,” said Perry, who works at Prevent Child Abuse Virginia and last November was proposed to by fiancé Ryan Gilbreath.

Wednesday’s banquet honored various volunteers with the program. Clarence Worsham, who has advocated for 1,137 children during four years of service, was named volunteer of the year.

The program seeks new volunteers, board members and donations. Learn more at www.vfkcasa.org, or call 357-2170.