Shop Talk: Bonita Keefe-Layden, RRI
Photo/Christina H. Davis
Bonita Keefe-Layden, CEO, Rehabilitative Resources Inc.
Bonita “Bonnie” Keefe-Layden knows a thing or two about leadership. She’s not only honed her skills as the CEO of Sturbridge-based Rehabilitative Resources Inc., which serves the developmentally disabled in the state through group homes and day programs, but also during her 30-year career in the Army Reserve. She joined RRI in 1977 as a residential manager and took over as CEO in 1980. The agency’s day programs, operated out of Sturbridge and Leominster, were recently reaccredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities. Here, Keefe-Layden discusses what’s kept her in her job at RRI for more than three decades as well as what the military and human services have in common.
>> You’ve worked at this agency for more than 30 years. What’s kept you here?
I think what’s kept me here mostly is that I’m able to be creative. I don’t own the business, I actually work for a board of directors, but I have the ability to manage the business and create programs that I know will help the people we serve.
>> Can you give an example of how you’ve been creative?
In our residential program we typically rented houses for our clients to live in. But when you rent, and you have a person with a physical need, you’re putting money into someone else’s property. Over time, I convinced the board we should actually buy, build and renovate our own homes so we could control costs. Now, we actually design the houses for the people who live there.
>> When you started working at RRI, there were 16 employees. And today there are 475. What has driven that growth?
What primarily has driven the growth was the lawsuit that demanded that people in institutions be offered a chance to live in the community, not segregated in institutions. It was called the consent decree. We still have five institutions in Massachusetts, but now parents don’t even think about institutions for their children. When they need services, our state depends on private agencies to provide that service locally.
>> What’s your outlook with the current state budget debate?
We haven’t had a cost-of-living increase to our state funding since 1988, so every year is a challenge and every year it’s a different challenge. Certainly with this economy, it is a huge challenge. So it’s everybody’s job — the parents’ job, the person with the disability’s job and the private provider’s job — to really work and educate the administration and the state legislators on what it really means to have services and what the impact is.
>> What’s the toughest management lesson you’ve had to learn?
In human services, you would think the challenge would be how to provide the services to the people with the disability, but the real challenge is how to work with all the staff and get where you want to go because everybody’s at a different place.
>> You spent 30 years in the Army Reserve. What lessons did you learn in your military career that you applied to your job here at RRI?
Leadership. Just because you have a job title, whether you’re a platoon sergeant or CEO, doesn’t mean people are going to follow you. You have to learn that as you move up the career ladder what it means to be a leader. It’s not just all about telling people how to do a job, it’s about what motivates people. I was deployed into the Kuwait-Iraqi theater for a year. I was put with a bunch of people I hadn’t worked with before and I had a job to do. That’s human services. You walk in the door, you have something you have to accomplish, and you have to figure out how you’re going to bring everyone together to get it done.
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