Walmart helps Intermountain Children's Home

Editor:

We serve on the President's Council of Intermountain, formerly Intermountain Children's Home. Intermountain works with children suffering from emotional trauma, mainly from abuse and neglect, and does a fantastic job serving children, families and professionals across the state through a wide range of services. We have observed first-hand the work of the passionate, dedicated staff of Intermountain and have seen the success of their program.

We recently learned that Intermountain was granted a substantial award from the Walmart Foundation to help them purchase new vehicles. The committee that made this award consists of local Walmart employees from stores across the state. We want to publicly commend Walmart and those responsible for this award for providing Intermountain with the tools to help more and more children and families in crisis. Their generous investment in Intermountain is also an investment in communities throughout Montana, including right here in Havre.

Most of you probably know about Intermountain's residential treatment campus in Helena that serves the most emotionally disturbed children in our society. However, that service only represents a small part of the 1,000-plus children and families that Intermountain serves across the state on an annual basis. Most of Intermountain's services are deeply entrenched within the community — school-based counseling, outpatient mental health care, home-based therapeutic support, therapeutic adoption and foster placements, professional training for social workers, teachers, etc. — and allow struggling children to stay in the community they call home.

However, all of those services place great demand on Intermountain's heavily used vehicle fleet. Thanks to Walmart, Intermountain will be able to offer more reliable transportation and, therefore more reliable service, to the children and families it helps. This was a thoughtful, deliberate award made with the needs of communities at the forefront.

As passionate volunteers of Intermountain, we want Walmart to know that this gift will make a big difference to the organization and the children and families it serves. Thank you!

If you are interested in learning more about Intermountain, please visit http://www.intermountain.org.

Charles and Pat Floyd

Havre