Since 1984, Sarnia Lambton Rebound has provided more than 13,000 young people at-risk with the skills needed to promote a positive response to self, others and community. The continued success of their programs has led to them being awarded the Donner Award for Excellence in the Delivery of Social Services for the past 12 consecutive years. In 2004, they also won the the national Peter F. Drucker Award for Excellence in Non-Profit Management.

Longtime executive director Mary Ellen Warren spoke with CharityVillage® about their key success factors.

First of all, tell me a bit about the programs you offer.

We traditionally ran programs focused on diversion from court for young people, looking at their strengths, rather than their crimes. Our premise was that, for the most part, it was a lack of skill development that had kids experimenting and pushing boundaries.

So the programs came down to skill development, some of them generic, like taking responsibility and decision-making. The programs then expanded to include kids experimenting with drug use as well as restorative justice programs.

And most recently we’ve expanded further. We were finding more and more crimes by girls or bullying incidents with the female population. And all research shows that it [the response] should be gender responsive so we developed our STAGE program. It’s a girls only program focused on relational aggression.

What accomplishments are you most proud of as an organization?

When I came to the agency, all we were doing was group programming. We developed a number of different programs with different focuses: general life skills, drugs, aggression etc.

What I kept noting, though, is some kids couldn’t manage themselves in a group. And we had to keep screening them out. Some kids also had slight development delays or OCD and ADHD and if put in a group of at-risk extroverted teens, you wonder if it will do them harm.

I thought we need to do this one-on-one; we need to expand beyond our group programming. So we created a program called STAND where we work with kids in a one-on-one setting. And that means we can serve those kids. For the most part they don’t need us after three months. But some need six, some need 12 months because they don’t have a stable environment or have multiple issues. And with a number of our programs, we can keep kids here as long as they need, in a stable, safe environment that is encouraging, strengths-based and holding them to account. We are no longer limited in what we can provide.

The other accomplishment we are proud of is we joined forces with two other agencies — Big Brothers and Big Sisters and we decided to compete on a whim for a million dollar Dow prize in Sarnia. And we won it. It went toward building a youth centre. So three little peon agencies got together — it’s a three million dollar project and we don’t have any paid fundraisers — and managed to do it. We now have an incredible Leed-certified 14,000 square foot building in the most desperate neighbourhood in Sarnia.

We were very surprised, most other groups had these full business plans and then there was just a few of us. The little guys won. Not only that, but sometimes when agencies get money, all staff have nice offices and they build in the nicest part of town. Our offices are small and our program space is huge. And we’re right smack where you’d expect to find vandalism and theft. But we went where we were needed. It truly was a community development response.

What is unique about your services/offerings? How has thinking big and pursuing balance helped the organization achieve its mission?

We are in a small town. When I started there were three staff and we were all part-time. And we had a reputation for being good-hearted but not based on social work practices etc. And we decided to go for it, regardless of how small we were. We were going to compete, we were going to be as well-run, well-governed and accountable to the community as if we were the big guys. We didn’t sell ourselves short, we wanted to be the best possible agency and not use our size as an excuse.

The other thing is we always ran the organization from our heart and our soul. It’s the balance of being intellectually oriented and still having a lot of fun. We’re very family oriented. There’s a book that just came out that talks about this kind of thing, it’s called Governing with Soul by Marjorie Sharpe. We care about our volunteers, we know their family situations and there are many opportunities to sit down and have coffee together; it’s not all about work. At the same time we hold ourselves to a high standard. And I’m happier, staff is happier and then the way you interact with your volunteers is different and the way the kids feel is different. It then becomes very easy for kids to say, “Yes I want to be a part of this group, so I’m going to start listening to the messages they’re giving me.”

What challenges have you faced as an organization and how did you deal with them?

I measure everything, I am always looking at stats. Before we decided on the on-on-one programming, we saw we lost 15 kids in one year. On the whole, that’s not a lot but I wanted to know what it was about with those kids. Because we look at each of them as 15 significant individuals. So the challenge was: some kids don’t fit, some kids aren’t making it. But what did those 15 kids need that we didn’t provide? And how can we provide it? We just wouldn’t accept it as is.

So that’s what got us out of the box and into one-on-one programming.

You’ve never shied away from change or the truth — tell me how that approach has proven effective.

It sounds easy in the beginning but you need to be open to feedback and willing to change. With other agencies I worked with, the evaluations method was designed to give them the answers they wanted. I came from a research background, though, and when you’re new to an agency, it’s easy to say, “I want to see if this thing is working”. But it’s important not to be afraid to hear the truth even if it’s awful. Because then you know and then you could do something about it.

For example, we ask parents really detailed questions about how their kids are behaving. We could simply ask, “Did it [the program] make a difference?” and they’ll all say yes. But we went deeper than that and talked about each of the major areas that we were hoping to change in the behaviour of the young person. In asking the detailed questions, we found out that, yes, they had changed the way they resolved conflicts and were much better at it but not when they were angry. If we hadn’t gone that deep we never would have found that out, we never would have added that part to the programming.

The other part of that is I think sometimes people are afraid to change because it means that what they’ve been doing is wrong. But, for the most part, change doesn’t imply wrongness. Change is about being progressive, about improvement, being the best you can be. So it’s about not fearing the truth and not fearing change. But you have to have the guts to go for it.

The Donner Awards is Canada’s largest nonprofit awards program. An award valued at $5,000 is presented to a winning organization in each of seven different categories. One of these organizations is also granted the William H. Donner Award for Excellence in the Delivery of Social Services, valued at $20,000. Learn more and apply this year at www.donnerwawards.org.

Elisa Birnbaum is a freelance journalist, producer and communications consultant living in Toronto. She is also president of Elle Communications and can be reached at: info@ellecommunications.ca.

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