The role of a CEO, says Patrick Lawler of Youth Villages, is to prepare your organization for the future: “That’s my favorite quote about being a CEO. That’s my role — to provide direction for the organization, to make sure that we have the contingencies in place to measure the performance of our staff and our models, that we have the necessary resources and people in place to meet our goals.”
Preparing for the future is always an uncertain endeavor, and when a pandemic strikes, even more variables are thrown into the equation. But under the leadership of Lawler, Youth Villages navigated the unknown by relying on its ability to improve and adapt to the growing needs of the community.
Founded in 1986, Youth Villages works with children and youth who have serious emotional, mental, and behavioral problems, through community-based interventions and residential treatment programs. “When we started, we had nine employees and a budget of $150,000,” Lawler says. Now, the organization serves 32,000 youths in 94 locations in 23 states. “Last year, we had tremendous growth during the pandemic. We’ve grown about 25 percent.”
That growth was mostly in their community-based programs, like Intercept, an intensive in-home parenting intervention, where a specialist works with the caregiver and the child to address issues impacting the stability of the family and potential success of the child. “When it came to the pandemic, we were fortunate because a few years before the pandemic we basically moved to all of our field staff having a mobile device — a laptop computer. We had all the remote systems already in place for when people couldn’t come into the office,” Lawler says. “You can talk to a family every day through a computer screen, which I know is not the best way to communicate, but when you went out to visit a family, you’d only go three times a week, but now you can communicate every day.
“A lot of community-based programs didn’t accept children, especially during the early months of the pandemic,” Lawler continues, “and we accepted even more children than we had before. Our staff weren’t traveling as much and could use that time to work with more children.” As Covid-related restrictions have loosened, Youth Villages has continued to do some of their work remotely to be able to serve more young people. “We actually found our outcomes have improved since Covid.”
As for Youth Villages’ residential work, Lawler says that, too, has persisted even in the midst of a pandemic. “We had just opened Bill’s Place [a residential campus in Bartlett] a few months before the pandemic,” he says. “And so we had a lot of extra space and a lot of empty rooms and empty areas for young people, so we were able to continue to accept young people when many residential facilities not only quit taking in young people, some of them closed altogether.”
About a year into the pandemic, Youth Villages also opened the Bower Activity Center, which raised morale for the children who couldn’t leave the campus due to Covid restrictions. The center includes a culinary classroom, dance and yoga studio, bouldering wall, workout room, drum therapy room, theater room, art room, covered outdoor basketball and picnic pavilions, a salon, counseling rooms, and dental and optometry treatment rooms.
“We try to learn from the young people that did well what we did right, and the young people who did not do well, what we missed, what other services should that young person have been provided.” – Patrick Lawler
Because of all this growth, the nonprofit garnered $343 million in revenue last year, which led to raises for frontline staff and an increase in starting salaries. “We know the value and the importance of our frontline staff, and so we put most of that money in our frontline staff salaries,” Lawler says. “We think about our staff as much as we think about the young people.” To Lawler, much of Youth Villages’ success is owed to the dedication of the 2,000 community workers and 1,300 residential workers. As such, in 2020 when Lawler received the national Jefferson Award for Outstanding Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged, considered the Nobel Prize for service, he says, “I received that award because of what our staff do.”
“We are constantly focusing on improvement,” Lawler adds. “We are constantly collecting data, analyzing it, and trying to learn from it. We try to learn from the young people that did well what we did right, and the young people who did not do well, what we missed, what other services should that young person have been provided. We really are very passionate about making sure that we are measuring the right information and making the necessary changes throughout the way.”
In fact, in the beginning years of Youth Villages, research concluded that the organization had a 50 percent success rate, so by 1994, they shifted perspective to the belief that if a child is best raised by their family and the community, that family and community also need intervention to ensure a child’s success — success being defined as whether, after a year out of the program, the child is still stable with their family and in their community and is in school or working.
“Young people are a reflection of the people they’re living with,” Lawler says. “When we started with families, we started seeing our outcomes improve drastically.” Today, the organization boasts an 88 percent success rate.
Going forward, Lawler hopes that Youth Villages can expand its community-based services to work more with higher-risk young people and young adults involved in the juvenile justice system. He also hopes to direct some of that energy toward the growing epidemic of gun violence in Memphis. “My commitment to this work is no different than when I started 42 years ago,” Lawler says.
