Page 40 - BusinessWest February 20, 2023

“As we think of children, we don’t want to be thinking of them in isolation — we have to
be thinking
of them as being parts
of families, parts of communities, parts of systems, and addressing all those aspects of children’s” experiences.
Will Dávila, outgoing president and CEO of Helix Human Services, center, with several staff members. Formerly the Children’s Study Home, the nonprofit is the oldest social- services agency in Western Mass.
and addressing all those aspects of children’s experiences.” As an example, Pappas and Morse both cited the Family
Wellness Center in Holyoke. It was established to address the surging need for outpatient mental-health services, a need that was there before COVID but made even more apparent by the pandemic, which strained families and individuals in many different ways.
“This is a walk-in clinic that anyone can use,” Pappas explained, adding that it was a timely and much-needed addition to the
portfolio, and part of an overall operating philosophy he described in this simple yet poignant way: “leave people in a better place than when they came to the organization.”
Elaborating, he said this process
of leaving people in a better place is never easy. Results come over time, and the road to progress is rarely smooth. The goal is to get them there.
“We’ve always been dynamic when it comes to looking to the future and where we can expand, strategically, not just for the sake of doing so,” he noted. “We know what we do best, and it’s really trauma-informed care. If we can be on the cutting edge of trauma-informed care, that’s where we want to be, with initiatives like the mental-health clinic.
“We don’t want people to be with the Children’s Study Home forever,” he went on. “But we want them to be
at the Children’s Study Home for as long as they need to feel like they’re on solid ground again.”
Name of the Game
It was Shakespeare’s Juliet who famously asked the question, “what’s in a name?” and then followed it up with ... “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Perhaps, but when it comes to nonprofits and their need to effectively convey who they are and what they do for a broad range of constituencies, a name carries plenty of weight.
And it is with that perspective that that the need to rebrand the Children’s Study Home
was identified during a seven- month strategic planning
Helix >> Continued on page 66
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