“I’d grown up in a pretty middle-class farming community, so I wasn’t aware of a lot of the abuse and neglect that was happening with kids across the country or even in Kansas,” says Trish Bryant, former Chief Operating Officer and recent retiree from Saint Francis Ministries. “It was a real eye-opener for me.”
Forty years is a long time – a couple of generations, in fact. It’s a long time to discover new information about the lives of others, a long time to build a career, and a long time to help make this world a better place for children. This summer, Trish finally closed the curtain on a career that’s born witness to significant change – most notably changed lives.
Like so many others, Trish never expected that her entire career in social work would take place within the friendly confines of one special organization. After all, she started at Saint Francis as a part-time summer counselor at SFM’s residential campus, Salina West. Fresh out of college, she just needed a job.
“It was the summer of 1985, and I’d already graduated from Fort Hays State University and was living in Hays (Kansas),” she says. “I had a friend who worked for Saint Francis, who said ‘Trish, if you don’t know what you’re going to do yet, why don’t you come and help us out this summer?’ She and her husband had no kids and an extra room, so I moved to Salina and lived with them. I was there all summer and loved it.”
Mostly, she loved the horses.
“Coming from western Kansas, I’d grown up with lots of farming and agriculture, so I fell in love with the horse program and with working with the kids.”
Relatively new at the time, Saint Francis’ equine therapy program helped young people heal from trauma through the care and riding of horses. Even today, it remains one of SFM’s most effective and most popular programs. Everyone at Saint Francis knows of the special place the horses have in Trish’s heart.
“I went back to school to become a licensed therapist about 10 years later,” says Trish, and I always got more work done with a kid on the back of a horse riding down the road than I ever did in a traditional office setting. Working with kids and horses together just opens them up. Their anger dissipates, and they come alive.”
As Trish watched kids change, Saint Francis changed, too.
“When I first started, we had a handful of residential programs for boys ages 12 to 18 years. We had a program in Ellsworth with 26 kids and another program located outside of Salina called the Bavaria Unit. They also had 26 kids. We even had a couple residential programs back east at Lake Placid, NY and a program similar to Outward Bound. We were much smaller than we are today.”
Since then, Saint Francis Ministries has grown to encompass a host of programs providing services to about 11,000 children and families in seven states – and Trish played a part in all of it.
Over the years, she’s held positions that include therapist, clinical director, and executive director of Salina West. When SFM received one of its first big state contracts, Trish was promoted to vice president, providing leadership to Foster Care Homes, the Care Center, Family Preservation, and Prevention. Most recently, she helped lead the entire organization, working alongside CEO William Clark as Chief Operating Officer. Just before her official retirement on June 30, she traveled to Picayune, Mississippi to provide transitional support to SFM programs for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Such is her skill and experience that Trish has always been able to lead virtually anywhere within the Saint Francis organization.
Yet she’s quick to credit her colleagues for the success of Saint Francis and for her own.
“When you work someplace for 40 years, you really get to know people,” she says. “I really like working with a group of people going in the right direction. I believe that when you put great minds together collaboratively, you can figure out almost anything. I’m going to miss my colleagues most and working with people who really care about children and families. I really didn’t plan to do this work, but I grew up in a very Christian family, so I was always comfortable and loved working for a Christian-based organization. Plus, I’ve love kids … I think God led me here.”
