History

Carolina Outreach, LLC, began in full in late 2003. While Tim Brooks had created the shell of the company in 2001, no business operations had occurred until he met up with Tom Reid, an acquaintance in the ultimate Frisbee community. Both Tim and Tom had considered creating a private company to provide mental health services, as they knew that the state was privatizing services and that it would be a good time become a part of the provider network. They discussed a partnership possibility, and it was at that time that it became clear that both had a consistent viewpoint regarding how to approach families that were receiving public mental health services.

In short, both felt that families were often not put in the center of services, and that—rather than the best interests of clients taking precedence—often services were designed with practitioners and systems foremost. Both had an alternative view that an in-home, strengths-based approach to services was what was most helpful to children and families who were poor, disenfranchised, and suffering from mental health problems. Additionally, both agreed that too often children were placed out of the home into conditions that were not significantly more therapeutic, resulting in trauma for the child. Tim and Tom decided that they would focus their efforts on working with families to help keep children in the home when the children were at imminent risk of out-of-home placement.

Starting off with Tim's two-bedroom house in Durham as a base, they began providing in-home services in Vance, Granville, Warren, and Franklin counties. Soon after, Orange, Person, Chatham, Durham counties were added. Initially Tim and Tom provided all the services and were the only employees, but positive feedback about their services quickly led to more referrals than the two of them could handle. To deal with this issue, they began using their contacts to hire part-time staff to work on overflow cases. It became very clear that in-home services were not in themselves sufficient, and that they needed a more complete array of services, hence added case management and community based services to their treatment list. Constant work and prudent savings allowed them to begin offering full-time, salaried positions, which further contributed to the agency's growth. Training of new personnel centered on the COFAST treatment philosophy discussed here, so that when clients receiving services through Carolina Outreach were assured a consistency of service quality.

In 2005, bursting out of the two-bedroom house in Durham with 45 employees, Carolina Outreach moved into an executive condo on Legion Road in Chapel Hill. Prompting further growth was a new NC State mandate directing clients to dispense with use of multiple agencies to provide different services, instead compelling them to choose a single agency with whom they wanted to work. It was testament to Carolina Outreach's treatment philosophy that the current clients overwhelmingly chose Carolina Outreach to provide their array of services. The agency doubled in size within six months, and it expanded into two more condos at the same Chapel Hill address

The agency moved in 2008 to Durham in order to accommodate further growth and to meet parking and other needs of employees, relocating to a former Elks Lodge with 20,000 square feet. Since that move, the agency has continued to grow and now has 130 employees. In addition to the child services that were the agency's primary services, Carolina Outreach now offers adult services so that it is able to provide a continuum of services for children transitioning to adulthood.

The agency underwent a national accreditation review in 2008 by the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (CARF), and in 2010 was certified by NC DHHS to serve as a Critical Access Behavioral Health Agency.

 

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