Posts Tagged ‘Another Name’
Another Name for Judevine Center
The restructuring Judevine Center for Autism officially announced its new name: TouchPoint Autism Services.
“From a strategic and vision perspective, we want to be the touch point for families facing autism,” said Ron Ekstrand, CEO of the 37-year-old agency.
The name change has been planned for months and Monday’s announcement comes as the organization restructured some of the services it offers to families, including a program of intensive behavioral therapy used in treating autistic children.
Ekstrand joined the organization a year ago as the COO to improve how it delivers services to families. He became CEO in February, and Rebecca Blackwell, the former executive director, departed. Blackwell is the daughter of Judevine’s founder and former president, Lois Judevine Blackwell, who is forming a new organization called the Judevine Center to train other organizations to develop services for children and adults with autism using her Judevine method, leaving the original organization without the license to the Judevine name or method.
TouchPoint has an annual budget of $15 million and 475 employees who serve more than 2,500 Missouri families directly and more than 30,000 indirectly each year, which TouchPoint said makes it the largest autism services provider in Missouri.
The organization had lost $1.2 million during the first three quarters of its fiscal year, which ended June 30, and generated $38,000 for its final quarter of the year, Ekstrand said. He added that the organization appears to have weathered the economic downturn and has brought in new employees that will allow TouchPoint to expand its services.
In a letter sent to families and supporters of the organization, Ekstrand and Mark Schaeffer, chairman of the TouchPoint board, said: “Our goal is to reduce the time it takes for families to get intervention for their child by taking the ‘guess work’ out of finding the support they need. TouchPoint Autism Services will be there whenever a family needs support to face the many challenges that autism presents daily — when they first receive a diagnosis, when their child needs behavior therapy, when their teenager needs help in transition, when their young adult needs support in employment, or when their loved one needs a place to live.”
Ekstrand, citing information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called autism a national health crisis with one in 150 children being diagnosed with some form of autism.
