In Memory
Helen Kroeger Jones

(Plain Press, August 2008) Helen K. Jones, a woman with long-standing personal, family, and professional ties to the Ohio City community, died of a massive heart attack in the emergency room at St. Vincent Charity Hospital on June 24 2008. Helen, 55, was the President and Chief Executive Officer of Recovery Resources, a local behavioral health treatment agency in Cleveland, and lived on Woodbridge Avenue at the time of her death.

Helen joined Neighborhood Counseling Services (NCS) as the Executive Director in 1988 and helped the agency grow from a small, grassroots program located in a decrepit storefront at Fulton and Bridge to a major organization with an operating budget of $3.5 million. NCS merged with Recovery Resources in 2002. In order to assure that services remained readily accessible to clients on the west side following the merge, Helen established a satellite office of Recovery Resources at 29th and Detroit in the old Van Roy Coffee building.

Prior to the merge, NCS, under Helen’s leadership, restored the Heyse Building at Fulton and Franklin as their headquarters, thereby stabilizing a significant historical landmark within Ohio City.

In May 2008, Helen was recognized by Crain’s Cleveland Business as one of its twelve Women of Note within the Greater Cleveland community for her 20+ years of highly effective service on behalf of low-income people facing mental health and substance challenges in their efforts to live successfully in the community. In 2004, Helen was named a winner of a Woodruff Foundation prize for her work in the field of behavioral health.

While well known as a highly effective agency administrator throughout a financially troubling time of governmental disinvestment in social services, Helen remained, first and foremost, a compassionate activist working on behalf of low income people with the greatest need for social services in Cleveland.

Her son, Mathew Engle of Falls Church, Virginia, her daughter, Sarah Jones of Santa Fe, New Mexico, two grandchildren, four brothers, and three sisters, survives Helen.

News & Articles | Archives