It started with one teacher

We exist because Kregg Thornburg didn’t accept that some children were too difficult to help.

Kregg was a special education teacher in Mesa County. He worked with the children other people had run out of ideas for, children with behavioral challenges, emotional challenges, disabilities, or some combination of all three. His conviction was that if you build on a person’s strengths, design services around that individual, and stay committed, you can help anyone, no matter how impossible the situation looks from the outside.

He was just as clear about where children belonged: in their own communities, with families, not in institutions, and he was willing to do whatever it took to keep them there. That belief led him to therapeutic foster care, a model that gives foster families extra training and support so children with complex needs can grow up in a family home rather than a facility.

All of this led him to co-found Ariel Clinical Services with child psychologist Lynne Cobb, Ph.D., in Grand Junction in 1994. It began as a small, mom-and-pop operation: a handful of people trying to meet a need they could see in their own community.

Kregg died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2003, nine years after Ariel opened. He didn’t get to see most of what came next, but some of the people who worked alongside him in those early years are still here, in roles from program staff to executive leadership. We’ve spent every year since building on what he started.

Then the children grew up

Our first major expansion came from a problem our staff kept watching happen.

Children who had grown up in our foster homes were aging out of the system. Many had no family to return to and nowhere to go. For young people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD), who often need support well into adulthood, the stakes were highest. The support that had steadied them for years ended on a birthday.

Tessa is one example. By the time she came to us, she had already lived in many different foster homes. Then she moved in with Carol, who became her foster parent, and she stayed for several years. In Tessa’s words: “I was able to trust her and settle down.”

When Tessa turned eighteen, she didn’t have to start over. She didn’t have to leave the home where she’d finally settled, or begin again with a new agency and a new set of strangers. Carol became her residential provider, and our team bridged the move from the child welfare system to adult services so Tessa’s support carried straight through.

From there, more doors opened. Tessa enrolled in community college and took a job at Whaz Up Dawg, the hot dog cart run through our vocational services. She’d held jobs before, and they hadn’t gone well: “At other jobs, I was always worried about getting fired because I was too slow or had to practice a lot before I learned how to do something.” At Whaz Up Dawg, staff helped her learn every part of the work, and she discovered she liked greeting the customers.

That was possible because we had already followed young people like Tessa into adulthood. In 2004, we became an Adult Services Agency and began building residential, day, and vocational programs for adults with I/DD.

The reasoning for building out adult services was the same one Kregg started with—people do better in their own communities, with support built around who they actually are. That doesn’t stop being true on someone’s eighteenth birthday.

The same problem, solved again (then again)

The pattern set in 2004 kept repeating. We’d notice a gap, then build something to fill it.

In 2013, Mesa County was struggling to find suitable placements for its youngest children in foster care. Children, many only about five years old, were carrying trauma and disabilities that no single family could manage alone. They moved from home to home until the county had to send them to the Front Range, hours from everyone they knew. We opened Sprite House so those children could stay in the Grand Valley. It’s a small group center where children learn to manage their emotions well enough to return to a birth family or move to a foster or adoptive family. One child who lived there said it simply: “Sprite House is my home and my family.”

The same instinct built businesses of our own. Whaz Up Dawg started in 2009 as a training ground for Members, the adults with I/DD in our programs. Trainees applied and interviewed for their spots, earned a food handler’s card, and learned the work one piece at a time: running the register, working the grill, restocking, taking inventory. They earned a paycheck while they mastered it, and when the skills were solid, the next step was a job out in the community. One Member who learned the ropes at the cart went on to work full time.

Charley’s Cookies followed in 2012, then Perdita’s Coffee Shop in February 2020, which also opened its doors to parents and teens facing barriers to work.

Weeks after Perdita’s opened, the pandemic arrived. Perdita’s made it through, but COVID’s challenges proved too much for the Blank Canvas Café and The Studio in Colorado Springs, which had a good run from 2015 to 2020. There’s never a guarantee that something new will last. Even so, we’ve generally chosen to try.

Where we are today

By 2024, we had more than 185 people and over over twenty distinct programs, reaching communities in more than a third of Colorado’s 64 counties.

We now work from five locations: Grand Junction, Delta-Montrose, Denver Metro, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo. Behind all of it is a network of foster families and residential providers who do the daily work of care.

Some of those relationships have lasted most of our history. One mother, whose adult daughter Claire has received services from us for more than fifteen years, put it this way: “We have received services for over 15 years in various ways but always with consistency, care, and professionalism.”

The programs have multiplied. The belief underneath them hasn’t moved: everyone has the ability to turn challenges into opportunities, and that work happens one life at a time.