As a student, Julianne Torrence ’87 took the Taft motto, Non ut sibi ministretur sed ut ministret, Not to be served but to serve, to heart. She became the youngest person to become a certified hospice volunteer in Connecticut.

      “I couldn’t run cross-country during my senior year” due to an illness, she says, so she was looking for something to fill that time and saw an ad looking for hospice volunteers. Having lost her grandfather as a young child, Torrence knew a little about grief. Initially, she thought she’d only do the training in order to write an article for the Papyrus, but she was hooked.

      “Taft’s motto was in keeping with my whole moral compass,” she says. “I always try to embrace everybody.”

      Now she serves the needs of troubled youth through her work with CJR, formerly known as the Connecticut Junior Republic. There, she had the opportunity to start a group home for boys with serious problems.

      “Not just delinquent, not just broken” she says of the youth. “We can help them figure out how to navigate this world and what has happened to them. These were the kids nobody else wanted. They had nowhere else to go. They had major mental illness and trauma.”

      “I’d always felt inadequate at Taft,” because she was a day student and a scholarship recipient, Torrence says. “But my weekends were filled with people in a safe space. I always had food and a safe place to go. People who loved me no matter what.”

      She recalls one boy who was living in CJR’s group home who waited all day for his father to come for a visit. “At 7 p.m., I had to bring him in because his dad was not coming,” she says. “That’s the kind of trauma I deal with. It was a group of boys who had literally no place else to go. But we could provide them a safe space.”

      Founded in 1904 in Litchfield, CJR now serves nearly 2,000 troubled youth and families annually. Torrence has been with CJR since 2007 and has held a variety of roles, including clinical program director for CJR’s Therapeutic Group Home, where she developed and implemented a new therapeutic, trauma-informed model for a group home for teenage boys.

      Torrence’s role has evolved into more of an administrative one. As the director of performance and quality improvement, Torrence is responsible for ensuring that CJR’s programs meet evidence-based and outcomes-influenced treatment modalities by reviewing programs and evaluating their successes, or failures. Since 2009, she has overseen a team dedicated to exploring and applying for new programs, as well as initiating and maintaining licenses and accreditations for the organization using data-driven strategies to guide programs.

     

“We do what’s right to make things [better], providing things that aren’t reimbursable. We look at what needs to happen to strengthen the families of these kids. If we do that, they’re probably not going to jail. If we treat them for 60 days on campus and they go back to their community with no sustainable change, nothing’s going to be different,” she says.

      “My job is to look at all the programs to see that real change is made. Is hope reinstated? Did we find a way for them to graduate from high school? We find a way out of the box to meet the needs of the kids. We believe every person has the ability to thrive if they’re given the right opportunity.”

      CJR started as an orphanage for kids who had no place else to go, Torrence says. “And we still [offer residential placements]. We find a way for them to connect to the community and to help them establish roots, nurture change, and grow possibilities,” Torrence says.

      Prior to CJR, she was a clinical social worker with McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. She is also a published author, having coauthored a chapter in Sociocultural Issues in Psychiatry: A Casebook and Curriculum.

      She is excited about recent research being done by her mentor, Dr. Chris Palmer, at McLean Hospital, that she is collaborating on. “Dr. Palmer has started a new movement called the Brain Energy Foundation. All the ills we see in the world, he’s really taking a deep look at,” she says. “He’s looking at mental illness through a different paradigm. It’s groundbreaking, and it’s going to change the world.”

      In her spare time, Torrence and her partner, David, are rehabbing an old school bus to make a tiny home. “I’ll have a mobile office to work remotely,” she says. “It’s definitely ‘glamping,’ but everything is self-contained. We’re going to go around the country and make connections. This is a great way to be together. I just want to live in the moment and find a way to give to others. That’s what we’re about.”