2025 Dynamic Dozen No. 5: The Arc of the Ozarks

SBJ: What has led to your recent growth?
Michael Powers: We were established in the early 1960s by a group of parents sitting around a kitchen table wanting to have more localized services for their sons and daughters with Down syndrome and developmental disabilities. Through the years, most of our services assisted and helped support individuals who were adolescents, young adults and older adults. About 10 years ago, we started getting a lot of requests for more services for children and therapy services, and a lot of that is a sudden increase in autism diagnosis. That’s kind of what led to this recent growth is wanting to do early intervention and trying to assist families and schools in identifying autism before they got to school age. We were fortunate enough to get a grant to open the Autism and Neurodevelopmental Center last year. We merged with TheraCare, which brought therapy services to help individuals and families. We also were able to expand our geographic coverage area. We have an office in Lee’s Summit and most recently we put an office in St. Charles, Missouri.

SBJ: What are some of the top considerations when it comes to managing growth?
Powers: They announced here just in the last month or so, 1 in 31 children are diagnosed with autism. That just continues to increase and expand. In order to expand, it takes several different things. One, it takes the funding to be able to assist families with services. We’ve really been fortunate that our legislature at the Capitol in Jefferson City has really assisted in ensuring that funding’s been there to help more and more families. I think more and more insurance companies are helping out, more than they were 10, 15, 20 years ago. The second piece of that is the manpower. Having the staff and the professionals to be able to provide all of the different therapies. We’ve been fortunate in that area too. When we did the autism center, it wasn’t just Arc of the Ozarks, we had partners. Mercy Hospital was a partner and they were able to assist us with obtaining a pediatric psychiatrist and other professionals. Our other partner is Missouri State [University], and their part of the partnership is to provide us with interns.

SBJ: You’ve doubled in size the last few years. Could you double again and the need still be there?
Powers: I think we’re still just scratching the surface of the true need. Obviously, there’s a lot of research going on to try to better understand how we got where we are. I think we’re better than we were decades ago in the identification and being able to provide that early intervention, which is so key. We can actually start services as early as 18 months at the autism center and be able to provide speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy and other types of support to really get started helping them catch up long before it’s time for them to go to school.

SBJ: What’s the best business advice you’ve received?
Powers: I’m a firm believer in meeting your mission. The mission is to support individuals with disabilities in directing their own lives as valued members of the community. You can ask just about any one of our staff, what’s the mission statement and they’ll be able to quote it for you because we preach it, but more importantly, we live it.