Bringing hope — Beech Brook helps change young lives, transforming the community

If longevity is a sign of success, Beech Brook stands alone in Greater Cleveland.

The Beech Ball, Beech Brook’s annual fundraiser to benefit its program, will be from 6 to 11 p.m. April 11 at the InterContinental Cleveland. For more information, call (216) 831-2255.

Founded in 1852 as the Cleveland Orphan Asylum, its mission is still much the same today: To heal and find safe and caring homes for emotionally disturbed and at-risk children, as well as providing education and support to at-risk families to break the cycle of abuse and neglect.

President and CEO Debra Rex admits she can’t say enough about Beech Brook and how it has built upon those roots to make a solid impact upon the community.

“It’s a wonderful organization; it changes lives,” she says. “In changing lives, it changes our community for
the better. In my career, all I ever
wanted to do was to help children and families. And I found a place to do that.

“What I also love about Beech Brook, is that we’ve become better and better at reaching out and making partnerships with the corporate community and the public systems — we can create such synergy and bring such forces to bear for the good.”

An active organization

Beech Brook, located on Lander Road in Pepper Pike since 1926, helps children and families advance their well-being and self-sufficiency in a number of ways.

“We served about 24,000 children and families last year in our various services with a budget of about $25 million,” Rex says. “This year, it will be about $27 million and with even more children.”

Beech Brook provides physical and behavioral health care, educational and related services.

“We are a very active, multi-service organization,” Rex says. “We have 45 discrete programs that are in various aspects of carrying out our mission.”

Rex says Beech Brook has a big impact on the community, not only from a child perspective and doing good work to make the community stronger, better and healthier as a result of the interventions, but also because it is a large business.

“We have $27 million in revenue and 450-plus employees in Northeast Ohio,” she says. “We do help fuel the economic engine. We purchase a lot of goods and services and are constantly looking for vendors who can really understand and meet our unique needs as a nonprofit and as a nonprofit human services provider, and who are willing to support us whatever way they can.

“Many of them support us philanthropically in addition to delivering the kind of products that we need.”

 

Growing partnerships

Rex is proud to note that the private community has given not only dollars, but has a lengthy history of involvement.

“We have many loyal companies that have been working with us for many, many years,” she says. “For more than 25 years, Ohio State Waterproofing employees, instead of doing a Christmas party for themselves, have donated the money and have come out to do a Christmas party for the kids in our residential treatment program. It’s just wonderful.”

Face-to-face involvement is very important when it comes to understanding the nature of the work Beech Brook does, she says.

“We look for opportunities for companies to actually interface with kids that we serve so they can get an experience of the mission,” Rex says.

“What we find is when the corporate community can really understand in a more hands-on way the nature of the work that we are doing and the benefit that we are making to the community, that both individually and as a corporation they are much more generous and wanting to invest in our mission.”

 

Getting to the very root

Rex says one of the advances in recent years has been the ability to spot potential problems at younger ages.

“We can now identify kids as young as 1 who are having or going to have very serious problems,” she says. “That’s a good thing because then we can work with the parents and really get things turned around quickly and easily. Like most things, prevention is a lot easier than treating something that has had a long time to develop.”

In order to treat the problem, Beech Brook takes the approach of outreach to day care centers.

“We work with day care teachers who are encountering kids with serious and persistent behavioral problems and who don’t have a clue on how to manage them. A lot of the affected kids are getting kicked out of day care centers because the staff can’t manage the behaviors if they have a tantrum or are having really serious problems,” she says. “We help them to be able to intervene so they can support not only the children who don’t have problems, but also the child that does.”

Staffers are also engaged with the family and work with the parents so they can help get the child’s behavior to be more normalized. Last year, Beech Brook served 102 children in its early childhood mental health treatment program for ages 0 to 3 years.

Older children are served in the Assertive Community Treatment program, which addresses them in a holistic way.

“We work on vocational things, we work on their drug and substance abuse issues if they have them, we work on their mental health issues, we look after their health,” Rex says. “So it is really a very integrated team-based model.

“The wonderful thing about that service is that it keeps these kids — who are at very high risk for homelessness, or court involvement or early death by virtue of their very serious mental health issues — we are able to keep them both stabilized and in community-based living and moving forward in their lives and out of psychiatric hospitals and prisons. So we feel really, really good about that program.” ●

How to reach: Beech Brook, (216) 831-2255 or www.beechbrook.org