Ray Fleming Dinneen
Ray Fleming Dinneen could bottle her model behaviors. The kind, articulate care she facilitates for women is deep and cyclical. And the beauty is that she is genuinely nourished by all the women she serves.
“It’s changed my life to see these incredibly strong women take risks and change jobs. They have to trust us in order to take advantage of this opportunity,” she says.
At CLIMB Wyoming, Dinneen—the founder and Executive Director—has been working for 25 years to ensure that single mothers have the most appropriate job for their skill set and life situation. For these women, that means acquiring new knowledge and training, providing them with counseling to help make a parent-life-career relationship balance, and offering them life skills training to avoid obstacles that have prevented these women from achieving success in the past.
With organizations like CLIMB, support from a wide variety of funding sources is further proof that the unique and comprehensive model is right; the women are obtaining the information they need to enhance the workforce because of the skills and confidence they’ve absorbed. CLIMB adheres respectfully to a mental health model which means staff talks with each other and with the participants at an open honest level, allowing emotions to fluctuate and circulate. Dinneen’s doctorate in psychology comes in handy to further evaluate and apply the right kind of learning and care to loosen barriers and conflicts for women and mothers, in addition to building solidarity within the program.
Though the reward is always in the results, Dinneen finds extra encouragement in the current recognition from the federal government as one of the top 10 organizations in the country for best practices when it comes to assistance for needy families. She’s excited to work with the Departments of Workforce Services and Family Services, as well as the group of professionals at the federal level, to ascertain what really works in the organization, what’s adaptable, what’s different here and there, and what’s the same with the other honored agencies.
Although Dinneen and her husband are recent empty-nesters, she knows that the family bond keeps them close at all times. In fact, her son still wears a CLIMB jersey on his campus, and her staff laughs about the maternal guidance that imbues the work environment – in a very positive way.
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