At Ranch Ehrlo Society, we are constantly striving to improve our services.

One of the ways we have done so recently is by adding CARE, Children And Residential Experience, developed by Cornell University, to our existing framework. One of the goals of CARE is to develop congruency across our vast agency, so that everyone from direct care workers, to accountants, to senior leadership, is applying the same principles to their work in our organization and working together for a common goal of helping our clients.

To highlight how well CARE is working our agency, we wanted to share what we are calling “CARE in Action” – an example of various staff members applying the CARE principles and the resulting positive impact on the lives of our clients.

Staff in our busy property management department recently worked double time to flip and clean one of our family treatment homes for new clients. Their reason for working so fast was to help a mother trying to enter the program.

The young mom wanted to be reunited with her son to celebration his second birthday, but the only way she could do that was to be formally enrolled in the program, living in the treatment home. She had not been able to see her little boy for a month as he had been placed in a foster several hour away and the referring agency did not have adequate staff to bring him for visits.

His birthday was just days away, but property management was able to arrange to have the family move in much earlier than expected.

“The tears were many and the little boy did not let go of his mom’s leg – and they woke up being together for his second birthday,” said Patti Petrucka, director of the Family Treatment Program.