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You Can't Afford Me
Making the leap from employment to entrepreneurship can be a scary time. The biggest fear people have is the unknown. Here on the “You Can’t Afford Me Podast” we speak with hustlers and innovators on how to make the most of your journey. If you have questions we have answers.
You Can't Afford Me
Your Child Is Our Mission: Inside the Work of Medical Home Plus
Medical Home Plus stands as a beacon of hope for families navigating the often complex and overwhelming world of special needs education. This episode dives deep into how this vital nonprofit empowers parents of children with special healthcare needs across Virginia.
Executive Director Emily J shares her 18-year journey with the organization, revealing how MHP has expanded to serve families in over 60 counties throughout the Commonwealth. The shift to virtual meetings during COVID actually accelerated their reach, allowing them to support more families than ever before. What sets MHP apart is their commitment to hiring staff with personal connections to disability - parents who have walked this same path and understand the challenges intimately.
Leslie Arthur, Manager of Outreach and Engagement, brings her perspective as both a mother of a child with ADHD and sister to someone with special needs. She highlights how MHP helps families who "don't know what they don't know" about educational rights and accommodations. The organization serves as a bridge between families and schools, ensuring children receive the support they legally deserve while teaching parents how to effectively advocate for their children.
Perhaps most remarkable is that MHP provides these services completely free of charge to eligible families. Services that would typically cost $2,000 per family are offered at no cost, removing financial barriers to essential educational advocacy. The organization relies on fundraising events like their annual Uncork Hope gala (mark your calendars for November 14th!) and community support to continue their mission.
Whether your child has been newly diagnosed or has struggled for years with visible or invisible disabilities, Medical Home Plus wants you to know you're not alone. Visit medhomeplus.org to learn more about their services or how you can support their work through donations, volunteering, or board service.
www.themrpreneur.com
Are you trying to reach decision makers, entrepreneurs and sales professionals, then you Can't Afford Me is your next marketing move. With six episodes a month and a growing audience of CEOs and industry leaders, your brand won't just be heard, it'll be remembered. Advertisers can place audio ads on our podcasts and even secure visual placements in our full-length YouTube videos. This is where smart brands earn attention. Lock in your ad spot today before your competitor does. Email sam at enzomediafirmcom to receive more information.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the you Can't Afford Me podcast, where we skip the fluff and dive straight into the ground Real entrepreneurs, real struggles and the unfiltered journey behind success. Let's get into it. Hey guys, thanks for joining us on another episode of the you Can't Afford Me podcast. We're back with another nonprofit. I'm really excited about this series in terms of spotlighting local great nonprofits here in the area, and we have two phenomenal ladies, but I'm not going to say anything about the organization because I'm also affiliated on the board, so I'm going to allow them to introduce themselves in the organization. So you guys, give us a quick 60 second rundown who you are and who you're with.
Speaker 2:Sure, hi, I'm Emily Giant Cristoforo. I'm the executive director of Medical Home Plus.
Speaker 1:Which we all call her Emily J, because nobody can pronounce her last name, and everyone calls Medical Home Plus MHP, so very similar.
Speaker 2:I'm the executive director. I've been with the organization for about 18 years.
Speaker 1:It'll be 18 years this summer, which is crazy.
Speaker 2:Did not realize that. Yeah, yeah, and I love the org. We work with families of children with special health care needs. We help their parents and guardians connect to local community resources and we do quite a lot of work in the educational advocacy realm too.
Speaker 3:Beautiful beautiful and I'm Leslie Arthur. I'm the manager of outreach and engagement for MHP. I'm the mom of a child with some special needs.
Speaker 3:We have ADHD in our household and that certainly is a community that we help support with MHP, getting them set up in the classroom for success, and I also have a brother who has some special needs and I've seen how getting the right supports under somebody really makes a difference. So my job with the organization is to just kind of reach out into the community and make sure that we have support from a donor perspective, but also that we're getting the word out and people know we're here.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, absolutely Appreciate you guys being here. So, going into my background, so I think it had been a long time coming for me to join the board with MHP. So I worked in the mental health profession for like 10 years. The paperwork ultimately just burnt me out and then when I was looking at boards like obviously knowing you for years, emily, so this was something that kind of spoke to my heart, kind of talk to us about the issues that parents with kids with special needs have when it comes to the school system and IEPs and different things like that.
Speaker 2:Sure yeah. So the families that we serve they. Often what we find is that they really don't know what they don't know. They, you know they want to be a very active and engaged part of their child's educational journey, but may not know what things their child is entitled to by law, what types of accommodations they can ask for. You know how to measure their child's progress, the fact that it needs to be measurable and not just, you know, subjective. So really, you know a large part of what we do is help to educate families on that process and where they can lean in. You know where their child's rights are and what they really can do to help foster a better conversation with their child's school and how they can set their child best up for success.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I recognized that when I was working in the school system with kids, where a lot of parents number one just weren't informed, didn't know what their rights were. And then I'd say, in all the schools but a lot of schools these kids just kind of get pushed to a corner and it's like here's a coloring book for six hours, just keep yourself occupied, and they're not actually working with them and teaching them those things. So this is a very important thing that we need in our community. Leslie, talk to us about your introduction into MHP, because prior to this role, you were with Metropolitan Business League. Yes, what brought you to MHP?
Speaker 3:Because prior to this role, you were with Metropolitan.
Speaker 1:Business League. Yes, what brought you to MHP?
Speaker 3:So over the past decade I've been a small business owner and so professionally my focus was really on developing my business. I own Bonair Soap Company. We were out at Farmer's Market selling things we've made. We had a store on the south side of the city.
Speaker 1:Did you bring me some soap today? I stopped making it.
Speaker 3:I stopped making it so professionally. I was kind of involved there, but you know how life is robust and always in the background there was, you know, the things to be tended to on the home front that had to do with getting my excuse me my son situated at school and shepherding him through COVID, and you know the virtual schooling and all the different hurdles, like big gaps of time with no school structure at all. If we look back to 2020, mid-march right, they sent all the kids home for a good cleaning of the school system and we didn't go back for like what?
Speaker 3:a year and a half, you know, and so that whole spring semester yeah, it was months and months of just open, you know, space and time with the kids in terms of their education. So you know I was doing my business. But also on the back end in my family life, you know I was helping my son and helping my brother who has something called DeGeorge syndrome. It's a partial deletion of your 22nd chromosome and has a whole lot of. It just brings a whole host of things that a person has to deal with. So I was helping him too. And when I found out what MHP was doing I had just closed my business. I'd spent some time doing some small business advisory with the Metropolitan Business League and I was kind of looking for my next gig and that just really spoke to my heart. It looks like a total pivot professionally, but it kind of just tapped into what I'd been feeling as a parent for many years.
Speaker 1:A lot of people don't realize how many of us have people in our families that are affected by things like this.
Speaker 2:That's so true.
Speaker 1:I know, back in my day, when I was a little bit younger, it was just like oh, that's just my crazy aunt Like we just didn't diagnose and that may be something a little bit more prevalent in the African-American community. We just kind of tag that as like oh that's my crazy cousin or that's my crazy aunt, but being able to help these families and provide that service, Emily, if you can speak to the amount of families really over the course of the last year that MHP has been able to serve and help.
Speaker 2:Sure yeah, so exciting times for MHP. We, over the last few years, we've really, really grown by leaps and bounds and we've always been a statewide organization serving all of the Commonwealth. But one of the positive things that COVID did for us as an organization is it allowed us to work with schools on a virtual basis 504 meetings, whereas they were all taking place in person prior to COVID, now the vast majority of them take place over, you know, teams or Zoom or something. So it allowed us as an organization to really actually embrace that statewide concept, be able to serve more of the Commonwealth. So last year, last calendar year, we served over 60 cities and counties throughout Virginia so all the major ones, obviously and we had 690 family engagements last year.
Speaker 2:And so when we you know, when we look back at our history, we've had a real acceleration over the last probably two to three years, and part of that actually was because of COVID, because the educational landscape is ever changing. It's changing pretty rapidly right now too, and also, obviously, the more families you serve, the more out there talking about you. We do a little bit of marketing, but we really don't have a marketing person in-house that's constantly working on that, and until we hired Leslie, we didn't really have anyone working on the fundraising full-time, except for myself. So a lot of our referrals come from word of mouth and families that have experienced our services and go off and tell other families and can help to spread the word about the ways that we can support.
Speaker 1:How much does it typically cost for these services for a year in school, like calendar school year? What does it typically cost to assist these families?
Speaker 2:Really starting out well. If a family were purchasing our services, so to speak, on their own, starting out, it would be at least $2,000 a family, to kind of to negotiate an IEP soup to nuts, if you will. We've gotten our costs down to 500 per child. So not only are we able to build in efficiencies to our process with our staff, etc. But we also don't ever charge families for any of those services. So you know, we truly have a scholarship fund that allows us to screen families for eligibility, but once they've been found to be eligible for our services, they receive services from us for pretty much as long as they need within reason, completely free of charge to the family, so that we can remove those barriers for them.
Speaker 1:Now that's a nice segue into the fundraising piece. Talk to Leslie about that. By far one of my favorite nonprofit events of the year is Uncork Hope. It's always a good time. It's always. From my perspective, it always takes off without a hitch.
Speaker 3:I'm sure.
Speaker 1:Emily would say something different on the back end there. But great food, great music, great entertainment, some great stories obviously coming together serving a lot of families. Talk to us about. I know this will be your first year behind the scenes on that event. Talk to us about some of the non-profit or the fundraising events that we have upcoming this year.
Speaker 3:Sure, so by far the biggest is Uncorked Hope, and that's, you know, that's happening in November. So save the date, emily. What's that date? November 14. November 14.
Speaker 1:Save the date.
Speaker 3:And like you said, and bring your checkbook. Or your credit card.
Speaker 3:This will just be a wonderful forum for us to tell some stories about all of the kids that we're helping and to bring people together for a really fun night out. People together for a really fun night out. There will be a silent auction, there will be some fun and games around wine and spirits, and so we really hope that folks in the community can come out and join us. Tickets will go on sale in the months leading up to November, but it can't hurt to spread the word right now. We've also just come off of a fundraiser this spring that we had a bingo theme for, you know, and that really got.
Speaker 3:Thank you, sam, that got the board involved and everybody just kind of spreading the word about MHP. But right now, in terms of events, Uncork Hope is the biggest thing we're doing. But as I am new, I am looking around for ways that we can participate in the community. So if you have an event or anything where it would be a good place for us to show up and talk about some of the services and the ways we can help kids with disabilities, we'd love to come out and kind of be a part of that conversation as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely, and we had. What was it this past year? Who was the jeweler that came and they were donating some things.
Speaker 2:We had a really beautiful piece of jewelry donated by Diamonds Direct.
Speaker 2:So we live auctioned that and we live auctioned an original piece of art done by one of the kiddos that we had served in the year previously. So yeah, really fun activities. We have a very engaging em engaging MC. That's always affiliated One of our other board members. His stage name is Richmond John. He provides John Newton. He provides live entertainment with his band and everybody loves to hear them play. So it is, it's a really fun evening out. You almost forget you're at a fundraiser.
Speaker 2:We like to say it's not your average fundraiser, but we do. You know we have a great time and we do really great work with the funds that we can raise that evening.
Speaker 1:Yeah, me and my wife treat it as a date night Like she doesn't see me suited and booted too often.
Speaker 2:I'm wearing a t-shirt and jeans. Y'all looked great last year.
Speaker 1:We're trying, so yeah, we use that as a date night, so I recommend other people come out and do the same there.
Speaker 2:And we'll also be looking for. In the next couple of months we're going to start our pitches for corporate sponsorship of the event. That's a great way for local businesses to get involved. We typically will have anywhere from 300 to 400 business leaders, such as yourself in the community, as guests at the event. So it's a great way to not only give back to a nonprofit that's doing great work, but also get your name kind of in the lights your logo in the lights, so to speak. And as a part of our sponsorship levels, we do offer tickets to the event, so great way to bring out your employees for a fun night out. It's like a win-win-win all around.
Speaker 3:So we will be looking for corporate sponsor partners as well, if anyone's interested in joining us, and especially if you have, as a corporation, any connections to education or to, maybe, therapy services for people with disabilities, like there's a lot of, you know, good promotion we can help. You know, do for you For sure, for sure.
Speaker 1:Leslie, talk to us about the boards Like so for me. I've served on a couple of boards up to this point. Mhp probably has one of the larger boards that I've ever served on and I know we just came off one of our big board meetings. Talk to us about what you've seen from the board now that you're part of this organization, and the pieces you see.
Speaker 3:Sure, well, I think in some ways the board is really mimicking the staff at MHP. So at MHP, you know, emily set out to hire folks that have a direct connection to someone with a disability. So for you, certainly you have the counseling background to draw from.
Speaker 3:We have members on our board that have children with disabilities. Everyone's like viscerally connected to the work that we're doing, you know, and that's the work of kind of lighting the path so that other families understand, like, what their rights are and what resources there are in the community. So what I've noticed from the board is that we've got a lovely you know smattering of dedicated people but all with that personal connection to the mission and that's really great.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and we have a very diverse board as well too, like various backgrounds attorneys, business owners, like executives there's a wide range there, and you said the board's pretty big but there's room.
Speaker 3:We will be looking to recruit some other. You know board members so you know if there's anyone listening today that has a connection to the work of helping people with disabilities you know we'd love to talk with you and see if, if there's a fit to be made.
Speaker 1:You know absolutely like big reason I joined the board is like when you run a business and you have a young family, like life can get extremely busy and I found myself like sinking everything into my business and realizing like hey, I'm not really doing a lot in my community, so like for me being part of a board, it's like that anchor may be the wrong word they're gonna be taken in a negative way, but like I do see it that way in terms of like it keeps me connected to the community. I think at any given point, whatever period of your life you're in, you should be giving of your time or giving of your money.
Speaker 1:And serving on the board allows you to do both of those. So I think anybody that's like you know you may have like buried yourself in your work and realize that you're not doing a lot in the community. Richmond is a very community centered sort of town so I definitely encourage people to reach out on that end. For those who potentially may know someone who needs services, where do the referrals typically come from? Are you guys typically talking to caseworkers? Are you talking directly to families? How are people typically finding out about MHP?
Speaker 2:Kind of all of the above. We do have a large community partnership in terms of other organizations out there serving the same types of families that we're serving, and that's something that we've actually, from a marketing standpoint, really focused on creating those inroads with other organizations in the community that are interfacing with these families so that they can think of MHP when you know those, the families that they're working with maybe a physical therapy office or an occupational therapist or something, when they hear that a family might be struggling with some of the things that we can provide, they can make that referral. But word of mouth to you know, like I said, other families that have experienced our services, people that have come to UnQuirk, and if they have a neighbor or a friend or a family member, they'll think of MHP and say well, I know some folks that can help you. So really, a myriad of ways and we try to make it really easy for people.
Speaker 2:Actually, on our website is a little yellow bubble that pops up as soon as you go to our website and it says make a referral or referral question mark, and you can actually make a referral real time and put in the family's name and contact information and we can contact them, or they can, you know whomever can contact us directly too, through either our email service or our phone line. Beautiful.
Speaker 1:And it's one of the better websites of nonprofits locally.
Speaker 2:I see, thank you, it's a very clean website.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we got a little bit of Leslie's background. I want, for someone who may be listening and, like they, see a path to one day wanting to be an executive director of a nonprofit, give us your story. How did you come to be exactly? I honestly don't even know this. Oh, you don't know okay.
Speaker 2:well, I have a degree in health care administration from Mary Baldwin College and when I was in school, I really wanted to be a long-term care administrator, so I wanted to work for like a continuing care retirement community somewhere like Westminster, canterbury or something.
Speaker 2:So I was kind of on that track, had done some hours towards sitting for my administrator licensure and all of that, and when I got out of school I started working for a freestanding skilled nursing facility and it just was not what I had imagined it was. You know, the troubles were too deep. There was a lot of turnover amongst the staff that was working directly with families and the residents, and I was. You know, I was part of the administration team but I was not the administrator. So I was really low man on the totem pole and didn't feel like I could impart. You know, the difference that I really wanted to see. So I had a little bit of a pivot and I went to work for a concierge medical practice at the time and it was a startup. It was a great place to learn a lot of different skills and I was really, really happy there for a long time and got a lot of different experience until I had my first daughter, or my first child, and she was she was a daughter and I was working like 60, 70 hour weeks and you know, just on the hamster wheel, like I was
Speaker 2:so eager and excited. And then I had Hannah and I was like well, I still financially need and want to work, but I don't want to work this schedule anymore. So I was kind of unofficially looking for a job and this job actually kind of fell into my lap. I had no nonprofit experience. I've always had an affinity for supporting people with disabilities all throughout my life, officially and unofficially and this you know, check some boxes for me, but selfishly, one of the biggest boxes that checked was it allowed for a lot of flexibility for my own personal schedule and my family's schedule.
Speaker 2:So I, you know, kind of stepped out on a limb. I took a part-time job with MHP at the time. It wasn't the executive director role, it was actually an operations manager. We didn't have an ED at the time and it was part-time salary and I, you know, decided to give it a try. I didn't know anything about nonprofit management. I didn't really know a whole lot about budgeting. I didn't know anything about fundraising.
Speaker 1:You're a pro at all those things now.
Speaker 2:All learned on the job initially, but it's been great for me as a person and for my family.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I really loved about MHP, in addition to our mission, was the co-founding doctors who interviewed me said you're an adult, you can kind of get your work done, however and wherever you want to, and this was before working from home was even a thing, um, and so they said if you want to bring your baby to work with you, you can do that.
Speaker 2:If you want to do your work at night, we don't care, as long as the work's getting done. Um, and so you know, for me it's been nice. I do work at the office, but we also still maintain a bit of a hybrid schedule, even post COVID, so that we can be home with our children and I've gone on to have three other children, so four children total, and each of them has come to work with me a little bit when they were infants and and I've been able to be there with them, you know, through school field trips and school programs and things like that still maintain a career but also be a present mom. So it's been really rewarding for me on a personal level too so hear that, ladies, you can have your cake and eat it too.
Speaker 1:That's right you can be a career woman and raise a family um, leslie, for you, what it? What is it that excites you Like, obviously, just starting this career with MHP. What is it that excites you for the future? Like, what are you excited? Because I know we met after you came on. We sat and chatted a little bit in terms of like some connections and things like that, and I can see that you're very excited to get your hands dirty and maybe try some things that MHP hasn't tried before. So what are some of the plans? And aspirations you have.
Speaker 3:That's right. Yeah, you know, looking around I can tell that the organization has been almost so busy doing the work, doing great work. We served, we gave scholarships out to 274, I believe children last year to get advisors. So it's so busy doing the work that we have some stories to tell about that work that we haven't had time to tell.
Speaker 3:And so I'm looking forward to getting in there, like you said, rolling up my sleeves and unearthing those stories and sharing them, because, listen, if you have a kid at home that you can tell is struggling at school, or if you've just been given a diagnosis and you're not sure what to do with it and how that relates back to your child's experience in school, we can help you. We can find you the right person that will tell you all of the things that the school should and could be providing to help make that path as easy as possible, and so I'm excited to talk about all of our successes and to also just spread the word so that families know that they do not have to figure this out on their own Nice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have often said that I think one of the you know, one of the hardest human emotions to feel is loneliness. I believe that deeply. I mean there have been times in my life and MHP really fixes that.
Speaker 2:We combat the loneliness. You know, these families sometimes feel very isolated. Sometimes they have there's like a bit of a grief process that happens when your child first receives a diagnosis, because you know that the life maybe you had imagined for them is going to look a little different. It's not insurmountable, but it's going to look a little different and you're going to have to figure some things out. And so, you know, by MHP employing parents of children with disabilities too, which Leslie referenced before we've been there and done that. We're on that same journey ourselves.
Speaker 2:And you know all of my employees that work directly with the families each have a child with a special healthcare need. So they, you know, they know what these families are going through. They're able to provide a level of hope that, quite frankly, you can't put a price tag on Um. So even if we don't know how to initially solve the problem for them, we're going to help to figure that out alongside them and we're going to be with them on their journey so that they don't have to continue to do this alone. And to me that's the most rewarding part of what we do. Sure, we get outcomes, we have impact, all of that, but the very human side to this is that we are there for families and for parents and for children when, frankly, no one else is and when they need us the most. So I feel like you can't put a price tag on that work.
Speaker 1:Love it, Love it. Leave our listeners with one last thought, and that could be in terms of making them aware of the services and how they can get involved with MHP. Like what's one thought that each of you would like to leave with the listeners Off the cuff.
Speaker 3:My thought is that there are all different kinds of disabilities that can affect how your child is able to show up in the classroom. So if you see someone struggling and you think they need some help even things like anxiety, depression, adhd, some things that are invisible, that you can't physically see as much we can help you with that and help get the right supports underneath your child so that they can just blossom and grow.
Speaker 1:Perfect, she's good. I see why you're hiring her.
Speaker 3:She is, she's awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean our tagline is your child is our mission, and we say that not to be cheeky. That's really truly how we feel and that concept really points to the fact that we take each child as an individual case and we quite simply do what needs to be done for that child to be on a better path in life, whether it's educational, whether it's accessing community resources it can run the gamut, but whatever that family and that child needs, we're going to help to provide for them in order to do our job.
Speaker 1:So yeah, if people want to help out, if they want to volunteer, if they want to donate, they want to sponsor, how can they do that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, look us up, email me info at medhomeplusorg, or you can call us our numbers on our website, medhomeplusorg. We'd love to have any and all people that are interested in helping us out come and join our team in a volunteer capacity or on the board. We also have an open staff position right now. That's posted on our website. So lots of different ways to get involved, and we'd love to hear from you.
Speaker 1:Beautiful and we need wine bottles for the event.
Speaker 2:Yes, wine and spirits for Encore Cope yes. And check out our event. We'd love to have you come to that too.
Speaker 1:Perfect. Well, thank you for being here today, ladies.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having us Absolutely Appreciate it.
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