MICHELLE Alden
How her past shaped her future career
Michelle Alden owns five horses and ultimately wants to become an equine therapist. She currently works as a licensed professional counselor, marriage and family counselor, and adoption and attachment specialist. (Courtesy photo)
No one walks alone . w w w. p a t h p re g . o rg
By Gaye Bunderson Michelle Williams-Alden didn’t have so much of an “Aha! moment” as a “What? moment” – in fact, she had two of them. Alden was adopted from foster care at age 6½. What she didn’t realize was how much that experience was shaping her decisions as she grew up. “When I was adopted, it was all about wanting to fit in and belong,” she said. It wasn’t until she volunteered to work with Royal Family Kids’ Camps in 2001 that she realized there was something behind her motivation that she hadn’t put her finger on before. The Royal Family Kids’ Camps are for abused, abandoned and neglected children in the foster care system. “It’s funny. It wasn’t until I started working at the camp that I thought, ‘These are my people,’” Alden explained. But, she said, that thought was followed by a “What?,” as if it hadn’t really occurred to her before. The same thing happened when she told her mom she was going to volunteer with Royal Family Kids. “Mom said, ‘Of course you are.’ I thought, ‘What?’ I didn’t know how my past was affecting me.” Alden is now 54 and actively involved, both professionally and personally, with helping troubled children, families in crisis, and children who have been in and out of foster care. “I started out working with foster and adopted kids and then working with adoptive families. I now work with any parents wanting help with challenging kids, but many adoptive families are referred to me,” she said. “I’m still very passionate about helping adoptive families.” Though her biological family members were not Christian, Alden nonetheless formed her own sense of the spiritual, even as a young child. “I remember always knowing who God was; I was always sensitive to praying and listening to Him. I knew Jesus from a young age and had always thought that God was taking care of me,” she said. When she was adopted, it was by a family of believers, a fact that has helped sustain her faith. Her involvement with Royal Kids solidified her career goals, and she started doing research on abandoned and neglected children to find out how to help the kids she was working with at the camp. By then, she had already earned a bachelor’s degree in religious education and worked as a youth pastor as a teen and as a young woman in her 20s. In 2002, she founded and directed her own nonprofit called Isaiah’s Ranch. Located in Idaho City, the ranch hosts an annual free, faith-based camp for children. “What got me into my current work is that I was training volunteers to work with the kids at Isaiah’s Ranch,” Alden said. Increasingly, she felt motivated to help families with kids who were suffering difficult emotional and mental states, and she earned a master’s degree in family therapy. But it wasn’t all about books and degrees for her. In 2015, she went hands-on and adopted a son, Ethan.
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8 November / December 2020 | Christian Living
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