April 15, 2024
It will be one year in April since Andrea “Drea” Hall became the new CEO at MYSI. The last year has been one of listening, learning, growth, hard decision making and continuous building of relationships and systems. Ms. Hall is grateful for the opportunity to help lead this organization into its next chapters. While we have done so much the first year together, there is so much more to do. Here are some highlights over the last year under the new leadership.
During Ms. Hall’s first year there has been some key accomplishments that she’d like to share with MYSI staff, board and stakeholders.
- Hired key open vacant management positions to assist with program implementation
- Hired first executive level positions in over 5 years
- Re-opened TLP site and increased the number of youth in care and thus increased revenue
- Improved health insurance options for MYSI employees
- Provided salary raises, promotions and cost of living adjustments to all qualified employees
- Improved MYSI visibility and collaboration with key stakeholders, such as the United Methodist Northern Conference churches and leadership, Chicago Public Schools and other external collaborators
- Helped recruit new board members
- Kicked off a strategic planning process and the accreditation process at the same time to help guide MYSI’s work for next 3-5 years
Ms. Hall looks forward to the strategic planning process that got kicked off in early April and the many possibilities for the agency. Some of the ideas for the future are to expand programming for our DD TLP for females, provide additional intensive services for all of our TLP and group home sites, hire additional case workers and supervisors, explore opening a 6th site on the West Side of Chicago, where we are not currently present and finally invest in technology improvements to create a technology hub at one our TLP sites that is accessible to all of our youth. Youth engagement will be another focus area for MYSI in order to help increase youth voices and listen to what matters most to the youth in order to be successful at emancipation.
The CEO will continue to build her leadership team and increase staffing to meet the needs of the growing programs. We will focus on development and fundraising in this year administratively. Ms. Hall looks forward to working with the board and staff on planning for the future.