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Ariel Clinical Services is a Colorado nonprofit with two main sides to its work. On the child and family side, we’re a licensed child placement agency (CPA) offering foster care, adoption, group centers, therapy, and youth mentoring services. On the adult side, we’re a Program Approved Service Agency (PASA). We provide residential, vocational, day, behavioral, and therapy services for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD), funded through Colorado’s Medicaid waivers. Every office has a local team that knows and is connected to its community. What’s offered varies a little from place to place. Pick the location nearest you and give that team a call.
What makes Ariel different?
It’s one of those things you feel and see and know before you could explain it. Still, if we had to describe it, three things are true just about everywhere at Ariel.
We pay attention to the person in front of us.
Where she comes from, what his story is, what kind of day they’re having. Paying attention is how a plan ends up fitting the person, day to day. Milo, who’s part of our adult program, loves Mustangs, and he wanted to drive one. Milo and one of our transportation coordinators, who loves cars, too, talked Mustangs on their drives. Together they landed on an idea: a Mustang built to Milo’s size, with hand controls. Milo bought the go-kart, the body, and the trailer. A local car club and a body shop donated their weekends, and the kart came out the other end in Milo’s red and white. No plan would have called for that. It came from paying attention to what Milo wanted.
We believe in what each person can do.
We respect people’s choices, and we believe in what someone is capable of, sometimes before they believe it themselves. Our job is to empower those choices and then back them up, whether that means a listening ear or showing up on a Saturday to help. Hazel, a girl in our mentoring program, is an avid reader, and a stop at the library was part of most visits with her mentor. On one of those trips, they found out two books had gone missing from her account, and the fines had added up. Together they brainstormed how to earn the money and landed on selling lemonade made from frozen fruit. Hazel worked out a budget down to the cost of a cup, found cookie donors, and sold out before lunch. She covered the cost of the groceries and cleared her fines, and came away trusting her own problem-solving a little more than before.
We stick around.
In foster care, that means staying when a placement gets complicated and when a family situation has no easy answers. On the adult side, some goals take years. Plenty of the adults we work with stay long after those goals are met, because they like it here and we like having them. It also means staying past eighteen. Ariel added adult services because young people with I/DD were leaving foster care and still needed support. Keeping the same people around them was the simplest way to keep their care consistent. Maya came to us as a teenager in foster care. When she was about to age out, she moved into an Ariel-sponsored home on our adult side, kept going to school, and became her own guardian. For Maya, sticking around looked like a bridge.
That’s what we mean by the Ariel Difference. We pay attention, we believe in people, and we’re here for the long run. It’s why so many of the foster parents, residential providers, families, and adults we work with have been with us for years. A lot of us on staff have, too.
In their own words
Stories on this site are about real people. To protect their privacy, names, details, and images may have been changed.
Get involved
Much of what Ariel does happens in a home: around a kitchen table, in the back-and-forth of an ordinary week. Each of these roles is a way to be part of that.
Foster Parents
Foster parents give children and youth a steady home, often while their families work toward being together again. You’re there for the day-to-day in-betweens: the ride to school, help with homework, the friendships and firsts of growing up. Ariel walks you through training and licensing, a monthly stipend helps cover each child’s care, and the team stays close once a child moves in.
Residential Providers
Residential providers welcome adults with I/DD into their homes and share everyday life: meals, errands, evenings in. Most providers will tell you the house gets livelier, with new routines, new conversations, and a new favorite show in the rotation. Ariel handles the matching and the training, you’re compensated for the care, and your case manager is a phone call away.
Group Center Owner-Operators
Group centers are licensed homes with their own staff, for children and youth who need that level of care. An owner-operator runs each one, with Ariel as the sponsoring agency. If you’ve fostered, provided residential care, or managed a program somewhere else, this may be your next step. Ariel supports the licensing, the billing, and the funding, and the business is yours.
