A CHANCE TO GROW INC
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Mission Statement
To promote the maximum development of the whole child and adult through innovative, individualized and comprehensive brain-centered programs and services.
About This Cause
I. Organization History A Chance To Grow (ACTG), a Minneapolis-based nonprofit, is shaped by its grassroots beginnings. Bob and Kathy DeBoer’s daughter Jesse was born in 1979 with significant brain injury. They refused to accept her doctor’s prognosis that there was no hope for her, and dedicated themselves to finding ways to help her reach her fullest potential. They studied everything they could find on brain injuries, and turned what they learned into a 3-year, six-day-a-week course of treatment, broken into one, two, or three-minute units of targeted movements. Over time, their daughter learned to speak, walk, and interact with those around her. Bob and Kathy began sharing what they learned with parents of similarly disabled children. Like the DeBoers, these parents were looking for better treatment options for their special needs children. What they needed were concrete ways to accomplish this task. These solutions needed to be affordable, accessible and sustainable over the long-term. Unwilling to wait 20 years for the research to catch up to their needs, these parents researched and evaluated interventions and consulted with specialists, sharing the most promising approaches with each other. Excited by what they found, Bob and Kathy DeBoer officially founded A Chance To Grow in 1983, dedicated to the application of the latest research on neuro-physical development of the brain, and buoyed by the unlimited hope of a parent’s dreams for their child to grow to their highest potential. Over time, ACTG has grown from a small agency providing home-based services to families into a multi-service organization that integrates brain-centered clinical and educational interventions to help children with a wide range of challenges, from those with significant brain injury to those who struggle to learn for any reason. While retaining our legacy of providing home-based services, we have expanded programming to provide clinic-based services on-site and in charter schools. To ensure that all children reach the optimal levels of brain development to succeed at school and in life, we have adapted our approach for use in Pre-K and K-3 public schools. And while our focus has been and remains children, in recent years we have expanded our services to reach adults whose brain function has been affected by injury, trauma or illness. Thus, we have turned the DeBoer’s vision of improving the quality of life for everyone, regardless of condition, into reality. II. Organization Mission and Goals The staff of ACTG believes all children are born with innate abilities and that each deserves a chance to grow to his or her highest potential. Our primary goal is to nurture brain and body growth in children, as reflected in our mission statement: To promote the maximum development of the whole child through innovative, individualized, and comprehensive brain-centered programs and services. In alignment with that mission, we seek to develop strategies and interventions that are affordable, accessible and sustainable over the long term. While our main offices are in northeast Minneapolis, we provide services throughout the Twin Cities metropolitan area, work in partnership with schools and programs across Minnesota and provide teacher-training workshops to public school teachers in thirteen states. These services are educational, therapeutic and habilitative in nature. III. Approach As the DeBoers and ACTG’s first families embarked on a search for treatment protocols for their children, they recognized a basic fact: We are all on a neurological continuum that includes a wide array of abilities and challenges. A lot of brain research has focused on the cortex, which coordinates all conscious thought. But for the severely brain-injured, not capable of conscious thought, it was clear that the focus needed to be on the brain stem, which controls unconscious motor activity. A healthy child is born with reflexes (primary movement patterns) that are unconscious responses to stimuli in the external environment – for example a startle reflex in response to a new sound or a rooting reflex to assist in feeding. These reflexes are the foundations of neurological development, the basis of the sensory systems – vision, hearing, balance – that ultimately help an individual navigate the world. Every time a reflex action is triggered in response to a stimulus, it creates a neural pathway for transmitting the information to the brain. Repeated exposure to stimuli builds neural pathways that build in complexity through the brain stem and the mid-brain and ultimately to the cortex. Within months, the reflexes become integrated (i.e. become consciously controlled.) Thus is born the thinking, feeling, learning brain. As the child’s environment becomes more complex, so do the sensory systems. However, if there is damage to the brain stem, if something happens that disrupts the development of robust neural pathways, the child will fail to develop the basic brain functions that support learning and thriving. Fortunately, the brain has been shown to have plasticity, i.e., the ability to change and adapt as a result of experience. This means that, in the presence of injury or illness, the brain can build new pathways to carry essential information from the senses to other parts of the brain that use it to help humans learn, understand, communicate and/or act on that information. ACTG’s programs are designed to build those pathways, integrate those reflexes and restore normal brain development. When doctors told ACTG’s first families that their severely brain-injured children were beyond hope, the families took matters into their own hands, searching for treatments that would work. Out of their research and their experiences emerged a set of principles that guides ACTG’s program development to this day. These principles are, first of all, rooted in a belief that our approaches must be multidisciplinary because every client we see is a whole person, not just a hand or an eye or a symptom. Moreover, to serve the individual well, we have to look at the family, the home, the challenges of navigating health care and insurance systems, the stigmas related to diagnosis, the need to ensure basic needs are met. Based on these principles, we have developed an array of approaches for helping individuals with brain-based issues, from children who suffered severe brain injuries at birth, to adults who experienced accidents that caused injury, from those with biochemical imbalances such as ADD or ADHD that affect neurological functioning, to those whose exposure to trauma results in disruptions in activity, from children with cerebral palsy and other developmental conditions to children whose problems with processing sensory information have led to difficulties with academics and social emotional growth. IV. Current Programs Consistent with our guiding principles, our programs are based in brain science, are designed to be affordable, and are offered in clinical, school, and home settings. ACTG’S SITE-BASED CLINICAL SERVICES Our brain-centered services place the child at the center by determining his or her level of development and addressing the full range of needs. Our clinical staff, trained in a wide range of approaches, work together to develop individualized, comprehensive experiences for the children we serve. Programs include: • Clinical Services o Neuro Integrative Clinic: ACTG developed this multidisciplinary approach that promotes brain growth and development through purposeful movement. The goal is to establish efficient neurological connections between the brain and the body’s systems, improving an individual’s higher-level functioning and their physical and emotional independence. o Auditory Clinic: This offers diagnostic assessments of hearing and auditory processing skills, as well as multiple interventions based on need. o Vision Clinic: Our vision clinic provides standard and developmental screenings, eye glass prescriptions and individualized vision therapies for infants, children and adults. o Outpatient Habilitative Services: Offered at ACTG and offsite in neighborhood clinics, these include Occupational Therapy, which empowers children to develop the skills needed to grow into functional, independent adults; and Speech Therapy for individuals of all ages experiencing communication challenges and speech disorders. o Contract-based Services: In addition, we provide student-centered, academic-focused and evidence-based occupational and speech/language therapy services in charter schools in the Twin Cities metro area and beyond. In FY2019, ACTG’s on-site Clinical Services provided 7,366 sessions to 587 individuals, two- thirds of whom were children under age 12. Offsite, we provided 602 occupational and speech language therapy sessions to ISKA clients at ISKA, Inc., a nonprofit in Bloomington, MN that provides disability services to the immigrant community, particularly the Somali community. Contract school-based services provided 7,959 hours of occupational and speech therapy at 12 schools. • Neurotechnology Services: Neurotechnology provides noninvasive interventions that help individuals reach optimal states of functioning via brain training. These interventions have been shown to be effective in treating a wide range of conditions, including bipolar disorder, autism, developmental delays, cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injury, PTSD and other problems. o Neurofeedback helps regulate brain waves o Audio-Visual Entrainment works with the brain’s electrical system to promote improved focus, attention, memory, sleep, academics, mood and performance. In 2019, Neurotechnology Services provided 532 sessions to 33 clients, two-thirds of whom were adults, and 55% of whom were male. Most (88%) were white, while 9% Asian American and 3% were African American. ACTG’S EDUCATIONAL SERVICES MLRC/S.M.A.R.T.: For many children, the first signs of neurodevelopmental issues begin to surface as they start school. It may show up as struggles with learning to read or