Joan Maltese

Child Development Institute
Woodland Hills, California
Encore Host

 

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Joan Maltese is President and CEO, and co-founder of the Child Development Institute which provides intervention services and an early learning center to help children reach their full potential. Encore Fellow Greg Bonn created the structure and organization for a formal development department, building the foundation for the organization to scale.

“There is so much value… It’s an opportunity to bring someone in at a high level that can build something needed for the organization to grow.”

When I first heard of Encore Fellowships, I knew it sounded worth looking at… we are always looking for opportunities for support in different ways. Once I learned more, I realized that it could be of big help to us. We were about to embark on an intense growth trajectory, and were creating a model for comprehensive care across the full spectrum of our services with the Intention to be able to scale. We wanted to replicate our model, and we first needed to create the right model.

We are a twenty-three-year-old organization, and I am one of the original founders. We have close to 100 people on staff, a mix of occupational therapists, speech therapists, physical therapists, child development specialists, mental health professionals. We provide early intervention service for children referred by doctors, daycare, preschool and others, and a free drop-in community play center, The CDI Early Learning Center (ELC), a museum-quality, developmentally-appropriate play and learning space to promote healthy development for all young children. We also provide a number of young adults with intellectual challenges work experience by such as organizing projects, reading to children and other tasks.

One of the most important needs we had was to develop a development department. I had been doing most of our development but we needed to create the fundamentals, starting at the ground level, and build the department up. I needed someone who knew how to develop the department. I couldn’t afford to hire such a skilled person full time, so Encore Fellowships seemed a perfect solution.  I needed an experienced person who had a sense of how the whole development area works top to bottom.  Encore found the perfect person with the right skills and talents.

Greg Bonn, our Encore Fellow, has tremendous experience in development, especially in hospitals and health care. My background isn’t development; I’m a clinical psychologist. Greg had a whole different experience, he knew the big picture, the strategy and the details, how to track people in databases, use the data, all the parts of development we didn’t have.  He allowed us to hire someone who had wonderful writing skills but needed training in development. He became her mentor. I couldn’t be that, as I didn’t have the background. She flourished with his support.

Sometimes you need a highly qualified person to take things to the next level but who has the money to hire that talent. Encore Fellowships let me hire someone part time who can do much more than a less experienced person could do full time. There is so much value and it’s so effective and efficient. It’s an opportunity to bring someone in at a high level that can build something needed for the organization to grow.  The level of context, organization and knowledge they bring is so high; this is a way to get to where you need to go at an affordable cost. It’s second nature to Greg but what he did was so out of our range of consciousness and knowledge.  I couldn’t go on building the model and scale of our organization without him. We are in a very different place now, in terms of foundation and infrastructure and in moving forward. I’ve asked him to stay on while we go through the growth period…. or as long as he wants!

 

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