“We truly became a constellation of stars, working in tandem for the betterment of the clinic and our patients.”
For nearly 40 years, a large community health clinic has served a significant immigrant and refugee population in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Recently, the clinic faced serious financial and strategic challenges, even as demand for its services grew rapidly. A number of satellite clinics had to close and a large number of staff were laid off. Morale was very low. A new director was brought in to turn the organization around.
To help staff embrace and navigate these major changes, and to help position the clinic for a viable and successful future, the new director brought Ariella Tilsen in to work with the newly constituted leadership team. Her task find a way to quickly encourage the leadership team to band together as a team to and lead the organization into its new strategic framework and priorities. Ariella adapted Stories Move Mountains to the context of the clinic and its culture.
She was also asked to use Stories Move Mountains to help align the strategic changes and ensure the continuation of high quality services to client. Ariella worked with managers, supervisors, and other key operations personnel. As a result of this process, both leadership and operations staff took a collective leap toward becoming solid working teams, embracing the challenges ahead with renewed hope and concrete actions.
The clinic’s director had this to say:
“Ariella led several work sessions with our senior leadership team, our board of directors, and a staff 150 to identify and ‘let go’ of those things, those identities and stories, that were preventing them from making the changes needed for the organization to survive. She then led our staff to embrace a new vision where each identified their unique role and responsibility to make our clinic thrive. Over half of our staff represents people of color and immigrants and refugees. She needed to bring together a very diverse group with many different stories, and that she did. She asks people to identify and bring forth their best attributes and skills to contribute to the organization’s mission or community improvement that is most desired. Without her guidance and her unique approach, we wouldn’t have been able to move forward as quickly as we did. We truly became a constellation of stars, working in tandem for the betterment of the clinic and our patients.”
