Reflective Essay
tigers2019_
ARCO.pptxARCO:Community Resource
By Camren Studer, Joshua Jenkins, Hillari Morse, and Ann Smith
Mission statement
“To empower individuals with developmental disabilities and their families to have quality lives through instruction, support, and opportunity throughout Northeast Louisiana.”
ARCO provides a variety of services to its adult clients to respond to their different needs of care determined by their different disabilities from affordable housing, job training and search assistance, and maintaining a community center for clients to socialize with each other and perform leisure activities together to in-home assistance, community integration programs by creating events for clients to interact more with their able-bodied peers, and counseling sessions for clients on either an individual or group basis.
Types of services offered
Arco Mission statement
STAFF AND FUNDING
ARCO receives 60% of its funding from the state of Louisiana with private donations, grants, and partnerships with for-profit businesses covering the remaining 40% of expenses. ARCO sustains a small staff in comparison to the majority of the organization’s labor being performed by volunteers of which the organization remains in high demand for more of.
Staffing and funding
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Examples of clients
Annual fundraisers
ARCO hosts two annual fundraisers with an annual barbecue and a Halloween haunted house, but both had to be adapted in a drive-thru format last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fundraising events
marketing
ARCO utilize a multi-media marketing strategy with online marketing on multiple social media platforms, television marketing on “Louisiana Living” on LPB, and with posters plastered in the businesses of for-profit partners including local restaurants.
Adaptations to operations
The leadership of ARCO has made several wise adaptations to their service model in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, so that ARCO could continue operating, and some of these adaptations that we learned through our interview with Ms. Adair, ARCO’s Director of Marketing, included holding online counseling sessions and holding zoom calls for Virtual Days with clients to replace the interactions between clients in the activity center by having clients perform those activities remotely.
Why Arco wants the grant
Ms. Adair informed us that ARCO receiving the grant would get the organization closer to its goal of $200,000.00 in additional revenue to fulfill the demand for its services from its 120 clients and other prospective clients in the region that need assistance. This money would help ARCO to accomplish the goals of their founders Ike and Shirley Hamilton, whom began the organization in 1954 after refusing to institutionalize their disabled children.
“The ULM Nonprofit class will ethically provide award grants which will empower nonprofit organizations to improve the community. We look for these organizations to be easily accessible and inclusive for those that need its services.”
Our mission statement
Why Arco should be chosen
We are confident that ARCO would be most capable of transforming this grant into substantive change for the community due to its well-developed management infrastructure that allowed the organization to continue its operations during the limitations placed on them by the pandemic as a service provider organization, thus this example of good leadership demonstrates that ARCO would invest the grant to fulfilling its full potential to effectively serving the community with the ability to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. The scope of individuals that ARCO supports from their 120 clients to their families in combination with the wide variety of services that it offers for clients with different levels of ability and need of care have shown us that ARCO is the nonprofit organization that can positively impact the most amount of people in our community.
