Recent Blurbs
Agency helps children, taking family approach
By Shannon Daughtry
Anjali Pinjala Ph. D. moved to Baytown nine years ago after a bully prevention workshop spawned a business idea that would be more successful than she imagined at the time.
The growth of the Texas Child and Family Institute captured the attention of the Baytown Chamber of Commerce’s Small Business Committee as it reviewed nominations for its 2010 Monument Award. Committee members were impressed enough to name Pinjala’s agency the Small Business of the Year.
“I was genuinely surprised,” Dr. Pinjala said Tuesday. “I guess we’re more known in Baytown than I realized. It feels really good that people recognize and appreciate what we’re doing.”
Dr. Pinjala started a private practice 11 years ago in Clear Lake. But after conducting the bully prevention workshop, she received so many referrals from Baytown school officials that she saw an opportunity she felt she could not pass up.
“I moved to Baytown because the majority of my clients came from this area,” she said.
After moving here, her private practice grew into an agency that now has a staff of 14 employees.
According to the institute’s Web site, its employees are devoted to “a solution-focused approach to turning pain into growth, adversity into resiliency and hardship into hope.”
Achieving that mission requires a strong emphasis upon customer service, said Dr. Pinjala. Her employees understand the importance of customer service because Dr. Pinjala puts an emphasis upon their happiness as well.
“The way I treat my employees and the sense of ownership I give them is one that I believe is truly reflected in how they treat our customers and our patients,” she said.
A mother of three college-age children, Dr. Pinjala was able to raise her family in part because she structured the business to allow a balance between her professional and her home life, she said. She has taken the same approach with her workers.
“I designed my business so that my employees could work however many hours they wanted and still have a family,” she said.
Dr. Pinjala said the respect that she and her employees deliver to their clients and the amount of importance placed on each patient is a top priority and a core value that she does not take lightly.
“We receive a lot of referrals that we are very grateful for,” she said. “It is important for us, as a whole, to respect and value our patients because we really do appreciate each and every one of them.”
Although honored to have received the chamber’s Monument Award, Dr. Pinjala pledged not to rest on her past laurels. She’s already hard at work on expanding the agency’s newly developed substance abuse program.
“Our substance abuse program really kicked off in 2009,” she said. “We have hired a staff, but this is a program we are really looking forward to expanding because of its high demand.”
In order to expand the program, the agency has moved into the once empty side of the facility that houses the Texas Child and Family Institute at 6730 Independence.
Other future plans include tapping one day into more federal dollars to support the institute’s growing list of services.
“There is so much need for federal funding here in Baytown,” she said. “We have created a program to target childhood obesity, but cannot implement it without the help of federal funding.”
Dr. Pinjala also hopes to find two more full-time therapists to add to her team.
“I am very picky and very careful when it comes down to who I hire,” she said. “My hope is that the passion that I have for this line of work and the amount I care about it is reflected both in me and the rest of my employees in what we do at our agency and for the people of this community.”
Baytown Chamber of Commerce Welcomes Texas Child & Family Institute
Baytown Chamber of Commerce recently held a ribbon cutting ceremony to welcome Texas Child & Family Institute as one of their newest members. Texas Child & Family Institute located at 6730 Independence Bldv., Suite 300 has been serving the Baytown and surrounding area for over 8 years in mental health services. The Texas Child & Family Institute embraces a solution-focused approach to turning pain into growth, adversity into resiliency, and hardship into hope. Using insight, compassion, humor and creativity, they strive to affirm every client's capacity for self-repair. They offer treatment that considers the whole-person (body, mind and spirit) by utilizing a holistic approach that incorporates the most effective therapeutic strategies.
Pictured:
Mayor Pro Tem Lynn Caskey, Council Member Terry Sain, Chamber Board of Directors and Ambassadors all joined Executive Director Anjali Pinjala Ph. D. and her professional staff in the official ribbon cutting ceremony.