Georgia nonprofit executive is driven by a passion for children’s health
Tanya Anderson originally wanted to be a pediatrician. She’s had a passion for children’s health since she was a kid and has been working with children and families for her entire career.
As a licensed professional counselor, she has now spent more than two decades with Youth Villages, a nonprofit that provides mental health, behavioral health and therapy services to young people and their families across 29 states.
Anderson first joined the organization in Tennessee after graduate school, then moved to Georgia in 2009 as the nonprofit acquired the Inner Harbour Campus it now operates in Douglasville. For the last 10 years, she’s served as executive director for Youth Villages Georgia.
“Youth Villages stood out as an organization, to me, that met families wherever they were,” Anderson said. “Regardless of their socioeconomic status, what communities they lived in, what communities they had, it was really about … what is important to the family and how do we keep children with their families even during the most difficult of times?”
The nonprofit often works with children who have experienced foster care. The mission to help vulnerable children and families with mental health and whole health care is meaningful for Anderson, who said she grew up in Mississippi with well-rounded family support but without many resources.
Youth Villages provides residential services at the Douglasville campus as well as in-home staff visits for at-risk children and families across metro Atlanta and a transition program called LifeSet for young people who are aging out of the foster care system and need support getting established on their own with employment and housing.
Service and leadership
Before Anderson moved into leadership positions at Youth Villages, she provided children with counseling in inpatient care settings and worked at homes and schools with families on care plans for young people. Even as a counselor, she collaborated with managers to make sure children’s needs were represented at the decision-making table.
Since stepping into the executive director role in 2016, she has focused on striking a balance between empathy and expectation in her management style, Anderson said.
“You have to have both of them and, depending on the situation that you’re faced with, you have to be skilled at determining which one takes the priority, without jeopardizing the operations of programs,” she said.
Too much emphasis on expectations can put an unfair strain on staff, while leaning too heavily into empathy can cause performance to slip and affect the kids’ experience, she said.
“Sometimes we as leaders feel like people work for us, but the reality is we also work for them. I do the best of my ability to serve my staff so that my staff can do a great job at serving the children and the families and the young adults that we serve,” Anderson said.
Anderson’s orientation toward service reaches out into the community as well.
Sara Ray, CEO and president of the Douglas County Chamber of Commerce, said Anderson “can have the craziest day at Youth Villages and come into the Chamber and have a smile on her face, roll up her sleeves and always will say yes to helping to do whatever we need to do.”
She “truly leans into doing the hard work that a lot of people would shy away from.”
Generational shifts
“I’m very proud that we’re talking about mental health,” Anderson said, noting that even 10 years ago the topic carried a much stronger stigma.
Ray, who grew up in Douglas County, has also noticed a change in the way the surrounding community views the residential care facility in Douglasville.
“It used to be perceived as a bit of an eyesore. People didn’t want to talk about it,” Ray said. Over the past 10 to 12 years, Youth Villages has done “a great job of welcoming the community in and … has broken down the barriers to everyone knowing and understanding the impact and what an asset it is, versus a detriment to our community.”
Youth Villages is in the process of raising capital to update and expand the facilities at the Douglasville campus to be able to serve more children and families in the future.
“Mental health is part of whole health,” Anderson said. “There shouldn’t be parity issues between how mental and physical health is accessed, is funded.”
Access to care before a person is in crisis and availability of personalized care for mental and emotional health can make a huge difference in keeping families together, she said. And it’s not only children who need that care.
“There has been an increase in the complexities of the mental health needs, the complexities of the family’s needs, and then how that has been impacted by unresolved generational things,” Anderson said. “So now it’s finding the right mechanisms for parents and grandparents to get the services that they need so that they can be healthier individuals as they are helping to cultivate the young people in the home.”
Anderson’s own inspiration comes from the generations behind her and ahead of her. Her mother was raising two children on her own at the age of 20 and decided to go back to school. She got a job at Jackson State University and worked there for her entire career, which Anderson said instilled in her a sense of loyalty to the organization where she works.
“She did not allow her circumstances to define what her future was going to be,” she said of her mom.
And Anderson’s two children see and appreciate the work she does now.
“My daughter always says, ‘Mommy, can I work for Youth Villages when I grow up?’” she said.
Correction
This article has been updated to note that Youth Villages Georgia now serves 29 states.
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