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I used to work in institutions,
and I started wondering after
I was there four or five years:
why is this kid different?
I found out that he is usually
afraid of himself, with no one
who will stop him. He gets suspended
from school, he runs away from home,
he gets banished from his community
– and no one will deal with his issues
except with a locked door or a fence
or a psychotropic drug.
I got sick of it.
- Bob Burton
Quoted in CBS Reports, 1979
VisionQuest's Story 1 (2) (3) (4)
In the early 1970’s troubled youth in America were treated very differently than they are today. Youth in trouble with the law -- at times for simply running away from home -- were often locked up in state or county correctional facilities. Private programs were primarily church-run orphanages for pre-adolescent boys, or private mental health and psychiatric facilities for those families who could afford to pay.Bob Burton had worked in the State of Delaware corrections system for four years when he was placed in charge of the youth detention center for Clark County (Las Vegas) Nevada. In that capacity he was selected to participate in a conference in Long Beach, California on “Corrections of the Future”. During the conference Bob was particularly inspired by the words of a mathematician who predicted that more success could be obtained in the field’s outcomes by having more alternatives, or “redundancy,” patterned after the design of a three-stage rocket. Bob left that conference with genuine enthusiasm for what he wanted to accomplish. He took the ideas of the mathematician to heart and decided that he had to provide an alternative for the “one way in and one way out” way that the corrections system operated.
Little did he know where that decision would take him and the thousands of kids who would be affected by it.
In 1973 Bob found an Arizona judge – John Collins of the Pima County Juvenile Court in Tucson -- who was also fed up with what the system was doing with kids in trouble. A visionary with a heart and little patience for the bureaucracy, Judge Collins placed the first youth into VisionQuest and ordered the State to pay. With financing from Bob’s retirement, and some help from his parent’s credit cards, VisionQuest began operations with a contract to take six youthful offenders from Pima County. While VisionQuest wanted to provide services to youth in their own homes, regulatory and funding mechanisms required that VisionQuest operate as a residential program. A wilderness component was quickly added.
In order to come at the problem from more than one direction, VisionQuest became accredited in the mid 70’s for five years by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals. This early emphasis on process, documentation and quality of care helped shape program development and also finally allowed VisionQuest to provide the home based services that had been its original intent.
By 1976 there were 130 youth in the group homes and home based programs around the state of Arizona. Into this situation entered the Bicentennial Wagon Train. Coming through Tucson on its way to Valley Forge, it made an immediate impression on Bob Burton who was still trying to come at the needs of kids from different perspectives. Intrigued by the drama of recreating history, VisionQuest purchased a wagon and sent the kids from one of its group homes on the cross country trek. The trip was such an extraordinary experience for the participants in terms of promoting competency and teamwork that VisionQuest began finding ways to include more such experiences into its ongoing program for all of the kids. In addition to traveling over 300,000 miles by wagon through all of the 48 contiguous states, over the years kids have climbed mountains, hiked many a trail, taken camels across the country, recreated historic military events, sailed tall ships, driven longhorns from Texas to Montana, run in marathons, and biked from state to state and in wilderness areas.
