Candor Professional Looks To Expand Services In Stanley
Karen Clayton is the owner of Candor Professional Services in Stanley, a women-owned small business that seeks to enhance the quality of individual’s lives by addressing gaps in social service programs and building upon existing community-wide infrastructure to increase access to evidence-based coaching and consultation. Candor facilitates empowerment through living skills training and consultation in various areas of redevelopment. Some of the areas of redevelopment include education on empowerment, healthy relationships, and healthy communication.
She opened the business in 2019 and is looking at ways to expand the services she offers. She is looking at the rural health transformation grant program including the clinics without walls portion.
Her goal is to continue to make a difference in her community. She wants to be a resource for individuals, saying that she is aware of the struggles that can cause. She wants to visit with the clients and see what she can provide in support or point them to the other resources.
As for the peer support side of her business, she says that is in her blood. As peer support programs gain attention state and nationwide, she says she sees the value in peer support in different ways including businesses, social services and legal services. Sharing the life experience is important in that process.
Candor Professional Services is a faith-based organization, which Clayton says is actually a ministry turned into a business. What sets her apart, she says, is her faith-based approach, firsthand knowledge of whole health recovery and empathy when providing services.
Karen and her husband Curtis Williams lived in Stanley from 2012 through November of 2016. They moved to Bismarck where she worked with the National Guard as a readiness counselor. She founded Candor in 2019 and in 2021 added her non-profit The Family Love Peace Project. The Family Love Peace Project mission is a commitment to serving humanity through ministries born out of need in the global community. They seek to facilitate hope and ignite the restoration of faith by spreading the message of Jesus Christ to all. This is accomplished through providing faith-based recovery-oriented services that promote healing from trauma, teaching about the redemptive power of love and how to grow into one’s purpose.
The services provided are designed to support those in the community who are chronically marginalized and therefore feel hopeless due to poor coping skills and dysfunctional behaviors. They bring the love and light of Christ to those individuals who are home-bound, institutionalized, and/or failing to thrive in their community.
After their youngest son graduated from high school, Karen and Curtis began exploring what they should do next in their lives. She says that God told her to come back to Stanley. The community had been in her heart since they left. She continued relationships with people in Stanley and she was missing those connections. However, the couple also thought about coastal living. They started looking, but nothing opened up that fit their goals, especially with their love for small community living.
Then the doors opened again in Stanley, and they moved back on August 16 of 2022. Curtis, she says, has always done whatever it takes to take care of his family. He is semiretired now, but has found a job he enjoys to keep him busy.
When Karen was working at the school several years ago, she first heard the phrase “snow birds”. The couple decided they were going to try that but their three month adventure turned into seventeen months in North Carolina. During that time, they got involved in inner city outreach programs. They offered prayer tents, did chapel services and explored their passion for caring for others.
They then decided it was time to come home. While they enjoyed their time, Karen says that her passion is for helping those with mental health issues, traumas and struggles.
She found an opening with Senior Life solutions in Williston, a program offered by CHI St. Alexius Health. This program is dedicated to addressing the mental health needs of older adults from the comfort of their homes. Services include the initial assessment, group, individual and family therapy, medication management, and after-care planning.
The couple moved back to Stanley with Karen living and working in Williston during the week and home on the weekends. She has always had the desire to open Candor again, and having heard about the rural transformation grants she felt it was an answer to her prayers to provide services in Stanley through either the telehealth or clinics without walls grant programs.
She has loved her work in Williston but she wants to follow up with her programs providing small in-services, allowing her to bring her faith to the table as well. She continues to work on her full licensing with the supervision hours at CHI and then will sit for the state exam.
Her goal is to make sure people are healthy and mental health is a part of that. In Williston she is part of a Mindfulness Monday at the Williston Senior Center. She would love to do something like that in Stanley, offering small groups for couples or individuals in her own community.
Clayton has a master’s degree in counseling psychology, a bachelor’s degree in human development and an Associate of Arts in Psychology.
Some of the services Candor provides include sober living coaching, peer support, life coaching and substance abuse awareness.
Clients can find her information on her website www.candorprofessionalservices.com. They can contact her through the website or by email at info@candorprofessionalservices.com.