Robert B. Jones, Children's Aid and Family Services, Inc

Recently I had the pleasure of working with two members of A&R Consulting. Jennifer Dolan and Robert Anderson worked with the agency's leadership team by developing and facilitating a two-day retreat to focus on ways to improve and expand our outreach efforts to recruit foster and adoptive families for the growing number of children in our care.

The retreat was an extraordinary experience for us all and exceeded all our expectations. The high degree of thoughtful and thorough planning that our consultants invested in the preparatory work for each day, combined with the skillful, step-by-step execution of the days' agendas, made it possible for us to fulfill each of the objectives we had set:

1. To strengthen the team-building skills and relationships of our leadership group;
2. To move from "siloed" thinking to thinking both conceptually and concretely about issues with an "agency-wide" perspective;
3. To focus as a group on taking collective ownership of a key challenge to work together to find workable and productive solutions.

I am not surprised by A&R's impressive roster of corporate clients. They are consummate and skilled professionals. You would never have known that the retreat facilitated for Children's Aid and Family Services was the company's first foray into the non-profit sector. Both consultants worked deligently to understand our specific needs and the specific challenges faced by our sector. They showed great mastery in drewing out the contributions of each participant, and in integrating specific skill-development pieces into the agenda. Further, they brought an amazing energy to the process that encouraged the high-level of creative, innovative thinking we needed -  and the flurry of follow-through activity that has already began to reap the desired results for the children in our care. We all learned a great deal, and we all had fun!