I have worked in the health and human services sector for over thirty years. My career began on the frontlines as a clinician working with individuals involved in the juvenile justice and behavioral health systems. I have lived inside the complexity, risk, and accountability that define this sector, and it continues to inform how I approach growth, governance, and stewardship. The lessons learned in leading group sessions—first with teen offenders and later with adult probationers or parolees found guilty of crimes involving interpersonal violence—stay with me as an executive today, lessons that reveal the necessity of resilience.
That last statement may come as a surprise—learning resilience from people who have committed egregious offenses. What most people outside of behavioral health systems cannot know is that while the behaviors exhibited by the boys and men I worked with as a counselor are unforgivable, almost none are sociopaths. Many, if not most, have been victims of violence themselves. The majority want to change, which is precisely the focus of counseling, promoting changes in behavior through a guided exercise in self-exploration. Not to make excuses for their past actions, the underlying reality is that most of these offenders have been through hell and back again as kids. By necessity, if they wish a future within society, they must figure out how to pivot and learn how to overcome the challenges that helped influence the paths they have taken. Their ability to keep coming back to therapy, where the work is difficult and the outcomes are not guaranteed, is something I try never to forget.
I didn’t have a perfect childhood, one that featured economic uncertainty and that required necessary responsibility on my part, but the problems I faced as a kid didn’t hold a candle to the adolescents and teens I worked with. The oldest of five children with parents who divorced when I was nine, I became parentified at an early age and felt responsible for my siblings. My instincts have always been to create consistency and to provide for others. From an early age I was aware that a whole lot of people had it far worse than me. In the summer between my junior and senior year, I became a summer unit aid at KidsPeace, a psychiatric hospital dedicated to addressing the unique mental and behavioral health care needs of children and young adults experiencing severe crises. At KidsPeace, I found my calling, which solidified my decision to pursue a master’s in counseling psychology. (By the way, in a small world, thirty-year arc, KidsPeace joined the Inperium constellation in May 2026.)
The mainstay and true professional love of my clinical experience—my jam—was running group therapy sessions, something that remained true as I accepted other responsibilities. (In fact, I was still leading daily group therapy sessions while a CEO when I affiliated my company, Edison Court, Inc., with Inperium.) At twenty-eight, I was asked to start an outpatient psychiatric clinic—the first of its kind for the organization I worked for—and I discovered that I liked building out an entire program from soup to nuts, everything from painting and setting up the offices to developing the reimbursement systems. Learning every new aspect was demanding, but I saw executive responsibilities as an opportunity to expand the impact of our support for the people in our community who were struggling. I have a good friend who reminds me that throughout those years I was in the office every Saturday and Sunday. I wasn’t looking to get paid more. My focus was on growing the business and improving outcomes. I believe that drive had been ingrained in me from the outset because never had the luxury of stubbing my toe; failure always seemed like a heartbeat away.
Throughout my years as a clinician, I worked daily with those accustomed to life on a razor’s edge. In my current role as the Chief Development Officer for Inperium where rather than guiding offenders through counselling I work to guide organizations into our constellation, I encounter an absence of resilience with alarming frequency. Too often an organization’s executives and/or their boards are so enamored with the mission that they’re pursuing that they believe no one can replace them, that they’re going to endure just because they’ve been around for fifty years. It is a viewpoint that reveals an underlying complacency that invariably leads to organizations beginning to fall apart. By the time they recognize it, it’s too late to do anything independently to change course. There is irony in the disconnect of running organizations that have demonstrated the grit required to endure for decades only to be undone by bravado and timidity. While believing that they are focused on their missions, they have failed to learn from the very people they serve who practice resilience just to show up each day.
Those we serve need no reminders that life is a struggle. As leaders of organizations, it is our job to bring opportunity to their lives, and that requires that we do our best to demonstrate the resiliency they model as we move our organizations from failure through survival to sustainability. That belief system started to form in me long before I ran my first group therapy session and it stays in me as I work to expand the reach and impact of the organizations with which I work. It is the same spirit that I acted upon whenever members of counseling groups I guided graduated; I never said “good luck” to them because I don’t believe in luck. Luck is the intersection of preparedness and opportunity. I think we make our own luck. Instead, I always said, “Keep up the hard work.”