Lee Rone
Chief Operations Officer

As chief operations officer, Lee Rone oversees the programs and services that Youth Villages currently operates to bring help and hope to troubled children and drives our plans to bring our proven programs to more areas of the country.

Rone is directly responsible for our intensive in-home services, residential treatment programs; group homes; recruiting and business development departments.

He came to Youth Villages in 1994 as an intern in Vanderbilt University's MBA program. As part of his internship here, Rone surveyed children's agencies and officials in Rural West Tennessee to identify the most needed services in the area. The study showed a critical need for intensive in-home services to help both troubled children and their families.

After completing his MBA, Rone joined Youth Villages as special projects manager, where he researched, designed and implemented our Intensive In-Home Services program that uses Multisystemic Therapy (MST.) Youth Villages was the first agency to use MST outside of a university setting and the first to use the principles of MST throughout a continuum of care. Today, Youth Villages is one of the largest providers of programs and services derived from MST in the world.

Rone has overseen the program's expansion from the time the first children were enrolled in the program in Memphis in 1994. Today, Youth Villages' family counselors help children and families throughout Tennessee and Mississippi and in Alabama, Texas, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Florida, Georgia, Virginia and the District of Columbia. In more than ten years, Youth Villages' family counselors have helped more than 14,000 children and families in this program.

A native of Jackson, Miss., Rone holds a B.A. in English with a chemistry minor from Vanderbilt University, along with his MBA in finance and marketing from that university.

His published works include: "Solving the Puzzle," a study of children's services needs in rural west Tennessee and a chapter in "Blueprints for Violence Prevention: Multisystemic Therapy," published by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence.