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Thompson Child & Family Focus offers a range of services to tap into that power: therapeutic, family, and academic support; treatment for attachment disorders; and a host of other therapy options. And as one might expect, a typical workday for Amendum is anything but typical. In her office, located on one of the four Thompson campuses, any given day has her coordinating regulatory requirements, foundation requests and proposals, as well as managing a flurry of audits of programs, facilities, and finances. All administrative efforts must be balanced against ongoing program operation and development.
“But the beauty of the day is that there are always children,” Amendum says. “You can go out on St. Peter’s Lane campus and stop and chat with them, or go into the cafeteria and have lunch with them. You can go across town to the Child Development Center and rock babies or read to 4-year-olds.”
Rooted In Care
Rocking babies and reading to children has long been a way of life for Amendum. Originally from upstate New York, the mother of four, who spent her early career focusing on education and putting her advanced degrees in the field to use, arrived in Charlotte in the early 1990s. For many years she taught kindergarten and first grade, including at Eastover Elementary in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School district.
“One fine day,” she recalls, “some folks from Thompson and the YMCA called me at home and asked if I’d take a look at a project on North Davidson Street.” That project was part of the Success by 6 Initiative, a collaboration among the YMCA, United Way, Junior League, and what was then known as Thompson Children’s Home. The Initiative, dedicated to the well-being of children, prompted Thompson to recruit Amendum to begin its early childhood program.
Amendum was intrigued by the organization’s vision for the program, which included an increasing focus on prevention, as well as on intervention. “Coming out of an early childhood and kindergarten background, I saw so many opportunities to strengthen children and family lives at the very beginning, rather than waiting until the problems become so insurmountable,” she says.
Intervention and prevention continue to be the hallmark of Thompson today. Originally established as an orphanage in 1886, Thompson has served children for over a century, with a mission that continued as the facility expanded, changed locations, and evolved to incorporate full-service clinical and behavioral care. Within the last fiscal year, the agency served 9,600 children, with 600 of those receiving direct, intense interaction and treatment. The other 9,000 were served as part of an early childhood outreach department, which provides support and services to other childcare centers across four counties.
Families First
“There was a period in Thompson’s history where the focus rested exclusively on the child, with every good intention,” Amendum says. “This was not an uncommon practice during those decades. Now, research leads us in a different direction.”
That direction includes the critical ingredient of a child’s ability to connect with family, whether that family is biological, foster, or adopted. Thompson’s work in the areas of prevention and intervention strongly involves the family component. In fact, the staff identifies itself internally as “The Thompson Family,” nurturing an image of family that reaches out to heal children and their own families. Amendum lavishes praise upon her staff members and extols their capacity for serving as leaders in the lives of others.
“Sometimes we take people right out of college with five minutes of experience and we ask them to do one of the hardest jobs in America and to change the life of a child,” Amendum says. “And they do it, over and over again.”
In June 2008, Thompson Child & Family Focus merged with The Family Center, another local nonprofit group with a compatible mission. The merger of the two organizations allows Thompson to provide a broader range of services to an expanded client base while eliminating competitive and overlapping services within the community, as well as realizing a reduction in administrative costs. These strategies offer responses to requests often heard from funding partners.
Funding comes via diversified sources that range from Medicaid and childcare subsidies to investment and donor support. “Thompson recognizes and is continually grateful for the wonderful sense of responsibility that exists for the wounded among us here in Charlotte,” Amendum says. “I can’t emphasize that enough.”
Miraculous Transformations
Lives are changed every day at Thompson. Amendum recalls a recent incident involving the prayer chain, a weekly ritual during chapel service, where everyone is offered an opportunity to share a thought or prayer on a paper link, which is added to an existing chain. The exercise provides a visual representation of the sense of family and community that so many of these children have never experienced.
“A child who began life in an orphanage in Eastern Russia and was never picked up or held or touched or acknowledged for the first two years of her life told me that she wanted to write on her prayer chain that she had a happy day,” Amendum says. “There’s a recognition that a destructive life pattern has stopped and turned around and is headed toward future success and happiness.”
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Thompson Child & Family Focus helps children by supporting families.
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Worship is one of the four cornerstones of the Thompson philosophy, as are healing, teaching, and perhaps the most important — play. As Amendum sees it, the other three concepts spring from play, and she believes we all need to play more often and better. Having fun is critical for the many Thompson children who arrive angry or withdrawn, as a result of having lived in abject, at-risk environments with no sense of personal worth.
“But then, before you know it, they are out and about on the campus, and all of a sudden you get your eye on one of them and he or she is whizzing by on a scooter and all caught up in, really, what should be a natural birthright,” Amendum says. “It’s an incredible feeling and reward for a very tough job, to know that you have somehow been responsible for changing a life.”
Bright Horizons
So what does the future hold for Thompson? To continue to specialize within the broader spectrum of human services, the organization has plans to relocate the Thompson Child Development Center to a new site that will have an increased ability to serve more children and house the Early Childhood Outreach Department. The agency is also building four new, clinically appropriate cottages on the main campus to house the psychiatric residential program and free up the pre-existing cottages to respond to other articulated community needs.
It’s all in a day’s work for Ginny Amendum, who has a full life outside of her Thompson family. She loves spending time in her garden at her Harrisburg home, which she shares with her husband of 39 years, Jim Amendum, assistant superintendent of Cabarrus County Schools. The couple’s four children are now grown, but four grandchildren help keep the Amendums delightfully family focused. With one son working in the field of education, a daughter making her mark in the corporate world and another son serving as a conductor on Broadway, Amendum fondly mentions her youngest daughter, a recent graduate who is still “seeking her path in life.” “We keep telling her she’s got to go work for a nonprofit so we’ll have all our areas covered,” Amendum says with a laugh.
Amendum believes Thompson Child & Family Focus must never back down from the highest standard of excellence in the services it provides and the business plans to support those services. “There are great challenges and obstacles that threaten the work we do, but there is always that core of confidence and sense of commitment to our mission,” she says. “It’s back to that old saying that you get what you pay for. Running Thompson is expensive work, not only in terms of dollars but also in terms of human resources. But the product is incredible.” TCW
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