Out of Balance… Part 2

Less than a year into my role as President/CEO of a faith-centered, non-profit, drug and alcohol treatment center I began to learn a lot. It was the middle of 2016 and I was studying the terrible opioid crisis that was devastating most of the country. I read a statistic from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that stated between the years 2000-2014 that over 500,000 individuals died due to overdose deaths. To bring it a little closer to home I learned that in 2015 over 3,500 Pennsylvanians died from overdose deaths and then over 4,600 in 2016. These statistics challenged me deep in my soul and caused me to begin asking a lot of questions concerning what our organization was doing to make things better. I began studying what services were being requested from our organization and when I found out the results I was a bit devastated. As a faith-based provider of drug and alcohol recovery services I found that our organization was only helping about 20 out of every 100 individuals calling us for help. These statistics gripped my heart and I (along with other leaders in our organization) decided we needed to do more. We developed a few simple, but profound goals for our organization: 1) Maximize our ability to help preserve human life, 2) Provide expanded services to help more people, and 3) And most important! Facilitate opportunities for the souls in our care to experience a real and living relationship with God in Jesus Christ.

In order for us to make these goals a reality our organization began going through a dramatic period of growth and everyone in the organization was stretched to max capacity. We made the difficult and challenging decision to do more because we believed it was the right thing to do in order for us to honor God and help people created in His image. We needed to do something to help keep people alive in order for us to help them with their complex needs. We added medical services along with clinical counseling services to serve as complimentary services to our foundational, faith-based program. The addition of these services was very challenging and very stressful. If I thought my life was out of balance for the first year and a half in my role as President/CEO, this year was on another level. I remember the process of figuring out that I would become the organization’s chief recruiter of executive talent because like I said before, “I only knew what I knew, until I knew better.” In other words, I had no clue that this would become one of my central roles in our organization at that time. I experienced a lot more of these types of things as time went by during that first year. We knew that we needed to provide services to care for the Bio/Psycho/Social/Spiritual needs of the souls in our care and we knew what services we needed to provide to begin making this a reality. I eventually thought of the name #Project80 and this would become our organizational strategy for a couple of years to come.

I will share more about this concept along with several of the ways this year challenged me beyond any level of capacity I thought was in me, in the next post. I will leave this post with two of my favorite words, “But God” and I believe that is how I made it… Have you ever experienced the feeling of being overwhelmed beyond your capacity? I hope its not only me…