Mainstream Living

Monthly Service Excellence Award Winners

Congratulations to the following individuals for being recognized as this month's Service Excellence Award Winners. Your gift cards will be delivered to your supervisor. Each month, employees are recognized for going "above and beyond" in their service to members.  We encourage staff and managers to nominate a fellow staff member by visiting: http://www.mainstreamliving.org/about-us/employee-recognition/.

Lainey Carnahan, nominated by Michelle Strutzenberg

Lainey has helped one of our hourly members with an enormous amount of tasks in the past couple of months. He has had some issues with a false court charge that came up on a background check. This kept him from moving. Lainey helped fill out and submit paperwork and help dispute this charge. She also had helped him to pack, find a new apartment, and explain all of the process to keep him from becoming upset. And during all this time, Lainey has not stopped coming up creative ideas to help him work towards his goals. She created recipe books for him, is working on helping him budget weekly and use his new debit card, and finding social activities for him to do. Lainey has gone above and beyond with tackling all the issues, always with a smile. She represents the true Mainstream Living values.

Megan Friestad, nominated by Traci Miner and Serena McCuen

Megan has established an amazing bond of trust with a member she supports at a daily site. This member is deathly afraid of anything that has to do with medical care. The member needed to have an abscess tooth extracted which would require a trip to the hospital for sedation and oral surgery. Due to their relationship, Megan was asked to come in on her day off to see if she could convince this member to attend her appointment.  Megan was happy to help and still agreed even after this member had attacked her in March after a bad medication reaction (multiple bites, hair pulling, kicking, etc involving police intervention). This member calmly walked with Megan into the hospital and back to a room. Once in that room, they had to wait over 2 1/2 hours before she was sedated. Megan was able to calm her when she became anxious and she found ways to entertain her through the duration. There was a back up team of five others in the waiting room to assist if needed. Each time we checked in with Megan we all sat in awe and amazement of what she was accomplishing with this member. While Megan dealt with her anxieties during that time, she prevented the appointment from turning into a very traumatic event. 

Kevin Smith, nominated by Bill Vaughn

Kevin demonstrates our Mainstream Living values on a daily basis. He advances our services while making our jobs as simple as possible, and is always working to make us more accountable and efficient. He is uniquely skilled at his job and has a talent for considering the needs of the members we serve, and our staff, while balancing the bottom line of the budget. Recently, our Antivirus was due for renewal and the cost was quoted at over $5,900. Kevin contacted the company we buy security and management software from, and negotiated a different deal. In short, he successfully negotiated a 45% discount (non-profit + bundle discount). Reducing the total cost per unit for all software from $61.00 for each computer to $39.45. WAY TO GO KEVIN!

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