Since 1983, Community Interface Services, or CIS for short, has helped people in San Diego with intellectual and developmental disabilities improve their lives.
The nonprofit’s administrative office may be in Carlsbad but most of its 225 employees are out in the field, making face-to-face contact with more than 1,000 participants with issues such as autism, cerebral palsy, seizure disorders or intellectual disabilities.
The company’s core value, executive director and CEO Kimberly Larsen says, is to put the people they support first. It was instilled by the founder of Community Interface Services, Rojane Lindkvist, who retired five years ago. Larsen, who worked alongside Lindkvist for 28 years, replaced her.
This interview with Larsen has been edited for space and clarity.
What’s your definition of good leadership skills?
It’s kind of hard to separate me from CIS because I pretty much spent my life here. We’re all about common sense, compassionate decision-making. We have a really good team. We’re like a family. We just work together and have a common vision.
How do you define your leadership role as CEO?
It’s kind of environmental scanning — keeping an eye on where the environment in our industry is heading, making sure that we’re poised to take advantage of opportunities, looking at threats that might be coming and making sure we can handle those so that the organization is heading in the right direction.
And then it’s trying to make sure we hire the best people, give them good training and support, make sure they understand our philosophy of the person being first, adapting our services as needed, make sure they have what they need, and let ‘em go.
Why is making it person-centered so important?
It’s considered a best practice in our industry, first of all. For Community Interface, it has always been a core tenant. We’re here to provide the services for the people who need them and should reflect what those folks want. It doesn’t matter what we want or what we want to offer. If nobody wants it, that’s not useful. So we really try to make sure that we understand why we’re in someone’s life, what it is they’re trying to achieve and how we can best help them do that.
How long does a participant stay with you?
It looks completely different for every person. It could be a day, it could be a lifetime. We have folks we’ve been serving since we opened. It all depends on where they’re at and what they want.
How do you think this company is different from a traditional, private company?
A lot of people have the impression that if they’re at a nonprofit, if you’re worried about the business side, that’s a bad thing. And it’s not. You have to worry about the business side. You have to be a healthy business, whether you’re a for-profit or nonprofit in order to continue to provide the services for participants and provide employment for our staff. So I feel like we have a really good balance of having strong business practices at our foundation, being very mission-driven and supportive for our staff. So it’s kind of a win-win.
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November 21, 2021 at 07:30PM
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Leadership winner, midsize company: Kimberly Larsen of Community Interface Services - The San Diego Union-Tribune
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