Thursday, May 10, 2018

At the Beech Ball this year - my first as President/CEO - I took the opportunity to share my personal Beech Brook story along with a look back at the organization’s history of changing with the times, as the needs of our community’s children and families have changed. I’d like to share this with you now.

There are four things in my life that I am passionate about: my family, Greater Cleveland, Beech Brook and the Cleveland Browns!

I want to tell you a story about where Beech Brook has been, how my story is connected and where Beech Brook is going in the future.

As you all know, Beech Brook is an old organization, founded in 1852 as an orphanage for children whose parents had died during the cholera epidemic. The epidemic ended, and Beech Brook had to reinvent itself – the first of many times over the last 166 years. Sometimes we have been forced to make those changes, and sometimes we have simply decided to change because it was the right thing to do. But we have always changed and always for the better.

After there was no longer a need for orphanages, Beech Brook became a residential treatment facility for emotionally disturbed children. In 1925, Beech Brook moved to our Pepper Pike campus, which was a farm at the time, donated by Jeptha Wade because he believed that fresh air was good for children.

This was another major change for the organization.

By the 1950s, Beech Brook was on the cutting edge of treating emotionally disturbed children and became a nationally known residential treatment center.

And that’s when my story and Beech Brook’s intertwine.

In the early 1950s, my grandfather was a coal miner in Pennsylvania. My grandmother was a homemaker who never finished high school. They lived in a small house with no running hot water, no indoor toilet and only a coal stove to heat the house. They raised five children: four boys and my mom, who is the youngest. All four of my uncles were in the military, and after they were discharged, they all moved to Cleveland to find work and a place where they and their families could thrive.

By the mid-fifties, my grandparents made the move to Cleveland as well. My grandparents knew how to do two things well: mine coal and raise kids. When they moved to Cleveland, they became house parents for Beech Brook. This meant that they lived on campus, in one of the old cottages with 10-12 children. I still have their original contract: $179 per month and one weekend off per month! This was a major change that took a great deal of courage. It was not an easy change but eventually, it also was a change for the better.

Over the next 35 years, I had several aunts and uncles who worked at Beech Brook. My mom also worked at Beech Brook and lived on campus for a few years, beginning in 1965.

In the 70s, Beech Brook started to develop community-based services to help children and families in their own homes and neighborhoods. At the same time, a little boy entered residential treatment and captured the hearts of my aunt, who was a cottage supervisor, and my uncle. They became his foster parents and eventually adopted my cousin. Beech Brook also launched its first group home in Chagrin Falls, pushing out from our main campus. My grandparents ran it, and I would stay there on weekends with them sometimes. You can see why working at Beech Brook is much more than just a job to me!

In the 1990s, foster care was growing at Beech Brook. Community-based programs were really taking hold. Our school-based program was growing rapidly. Beech Brook was again on the cutting edge, one of the first organizations to deliver family therapy.

The early 90s were an exciting time at Beech Brook! I was hired to work in our small school-based program, (which was also an idea introduced by Beech Brook years before). At the same time, we merged with Family Health to add prevention and early intervention services to our growing continuum of care. We opened a parenting and drop-in center at the Carl B. Stokes Social Services Mall where we remain the anchor today.

Medicaid was changing and so were we. It was getting harder because the rules were growing more stringent and complex. In response, we began to build our infrastructure and develop standard operating procedures, focused on outcomes and satisfaction with services. It was scary, but also exciting. And the change…again…was for the better. It made us better.

By the early 2000s, Beech Brook’s volume of community-based work surpassed the work we were doing on campus. We were serving thousands of children and families off campus each year to meet the growing and changing needs of our community. Residential treatment was changing, too. The kids were getting older. More disturbed. Exhibiting more violent behaviors. Cottages were locked down. Fences and gates went up. Playgrounds were surrounded by 10-foot high walls. It didn’t feel much like treatment any more. Many of us were spending 80 percent or more of our time addressing serious problems …every single day.

In 2016, as many of you recall, we exited residential treatment to focus our time, energy and resources on preventing kids from getting to that level of care. Residential treatment is not a place we want our children to grow up. So, we also changed our mission.

Where is Beech Brook going now? I’m asked this question often, and while I can’t say exactly where we will be in the future, I do know the direction.

We can look to the past to help understand where we are going in the future. Beginning in the early 1830s, cholera epidemics killed thousands of citizens in the United States. As many parents died, Beech Brook was there, providing shelter for the children left behind. Unfortunately, for people stricken with cholera, the treatment was often worse than the illness and was not enough to stop people from dying.

What did work was addressing the root cause of the disease by improving sanitation and creating a clean water supply…in other words, prevention.

Today, Beech Brook is focused not on treating but on preventing the devastating toll of a new epidemic – abuse, trauma, daily exposure to violence, and the toxic stress of living in poverty – and its lifelong impact on our children, our families…and the future of our community. Our common community.

We are moving upstream.

• We will address the needs of our community by getting closer to the root causes that lead to unsafe neighborhoods, child maltreatment and family dysfunction.

• We are growing our foster care program to prevent children from needing residential treatment.

• We are implementing community-based best practices that keep kids in their own homes, so they never have to enter the foster care system.

• We are providing school-based services, so children can stay in community schools and achieve. And, we continue to grow our early childhood programs so more children show up at school socially and emotionally ready to learn, and fewer need our school-based services.

• We are rapidly growing prevention and early intervention services like parenting, integrated care, services that support stable housing, and services that help reconnect communities and police departments and foster positive relationships, not adversarial ones.

The world is changing, and we are changing with it. And we are moving forward with courage. Because this, too, will make us better.

So, we will promote healthy child development. We will strengthen children and family’s ability to overcome adversity and enhance family health and stability. Our new mission calls on us to not only address the symptoms of our community’s problems, but to actively create better conditions where communities, families and children will THRIVE.

That is where we are going!