After nearly seven years at Shriners Children's Spokane, Justin Botejue has accepted a new position at Joya Child & Family Development. Botejue, a 2022 Journal of Business Rising Star, began his role as clinic manager of Joya JumpStart in July.

The Joya JumpStart program provides therapy services for children from the age of 3 until they start kindergarten, ensuring they have access to care after they transition out of early intervention services.

Your new role at Joya and your most recent role at Shriners are both in the pediatric health care field. Why did you decide to pursue a career in that industry?

I think I've always had a heart for the younger population, the pediatric population. My first real job that I was ever paid for was working at the church day care, right off campus at Whitworth. And just seeing the energy and the youthfulness of those really young kids helped me think, this is the investment of our future. 

I have an almost two-year-old now. We're expecting a baby boy any day now and just knowing that it takes a village to raise our kiddos in this community, I'm happy to help Shriners and Joya come around those families to help them with their medical needs. Medically complex families need that additional support, and I've always been glad to be there to support the folks that do that directly. 

I never thought I would be doing that, though. As a prelaw student, political science major at Whitworth, I really thought policy and policy development was the way to go. I dipped my foot in that and then realized, well, why don't I just do the work with the people that are doing the work too? So that's kind of how I got into helping support those direct service providers in health care. 

What do you do in your new role at Joya? 

Historically, Joya has not had a clinic manager role before, and my background at Shriners was more business development and growth and sustainability programs. 

I really have to commend the Joya board, the management team, and, of course, the therapists that are living that vision of providing the care. But they just needed someone to come in to help set up the systems so that they can be more efficient at providing that care.  

They started this new program called JumpStart. It's basically a program for kiddos that graduate from the Early Support for Infants & Toddlers program, which is the birth-to-3 program, as a bridge to ensuring access to care for medically complex families.

In my role, I get to support this brand-new team of really brilliant therapists in speech, occupational, and physical therapy. Do direct service for kiddos that are in a very sensitive transitional moment in their life when they graduate from 0-to-3 services to when they age into a school program.

Can you tell me more about Joya’s new JumpStart program and the process of getting it started? 

We were able to receive an Access to Care grant from (Health Sciences & Services Authority of Spokane County), which really helped us hire a couple people, figure out our processes. We've now expanded our team by adding four more therapists since that initial funding request. 

Just seeing that the immense need continues to be there, we still need that support to kind of help us get our grounding, so that we can make this a sustainable program. That takes time. I'm saying like, a runway of up to a year of us tweaking things so that we are really creating a program that serves families the best with good and long-term outcomes. 

It's different. Not a lot of people are trying to start new pediatric programs in a time when health care is really fraught with financial burdens, reimbursement issues. 

Pediatrics has never been known to be a money maker by any means, but I think we're trying to do the right thing in meeting access to care needs. There are wait lists for our services elsewhere in this community that could be years long. 

We're trying to do our part to ensure that our families have congregated care before they are eligible for a school-based service or something like that. Meeting the families in that gap is really critical.

What do you like about working at Joya so far? 

Joya has been around for 65 years. You would think an organization with that history would be set in its ways, but I quickly learned that there's such a startup mentality at Joya, that there's such a willingness to try new things, implement new ideas, play with our processes to better serve our families. 

And that's an environment I absolutely thrive in. 

I think that's a really big reason why they wanted me brought into this specific program, because literally building something from the ground up is something I get so much joy in, and Joya, they're living those values really clearly.

And again, I want to give huge kudos to the board, the management team, for setting that direction. I think if it was anywhere else, I would be kind of worried about, what did I get myself into, because the picture isn't clear as to what the goal is in my role. But it's so clear. We want to serve more families, we want to keep the promises that we're making to Spokane, that we're there for them. 

And then, of course, what's super exciting is that I get to support amazing therapists. I have no clinical training whatsoever. I won't even pretend that I understand most of what they're talking about, but if I can do anything to support the amazing work that they do, of living that vision of serving our families, then I know I'm in the right role.

Why did you decide to make the jump from Shriners to Joya? 

I served at Shriners for almost seven years, which feels like a lifetime to a millennial. 

My thinking process was, I'm just going to retire at Shriners. But then family, right? So having a really young kid with another on the way, and just determining that extensive travel to Alaska and Montana, which are not easy places to get to from Spokane, probably wasn't sustainable in the long run.

However, I was so pleased and comfortable with the immense growth that Shriners had experienced, that it was sustainable enough that I felt comfortable leaving their business development strategy in place so they can continue to grow sustainably while I helped a new mission like Joya’s. 

It was yesterday, right? The Journal of Business breakfast for Best Places to Work. We've been a finalist the past few years, and they really live up to that reputation of being a great place to work, and that was really attractive.

But really, it's the mission of Joya. So, still keeping the young families as the primary population I want to serve, that was key for me. Just the long-term trajectory of Joya’s growth, it’s just a place that is so exciting to be a part of. So, I said I needed to be a part of that, and the opportunity came at just the right time.

This story has been edited for space and clarity.