Faces of Rosecrance: Carlene Cardosi
May 30, 2017
Carlene Cardosi is Chief Operating Officer of Rosecrance Inc. She previously worked as Vice President of Residential Services and has been with Rosecrance since 2008. She has worked at both the adolescent and adult residential substance abuse treatment centers in Rockford.
“I moved to Rockford to work at Rosecrance. When I worked as an intern, I lived in Arlington Heights and drove here 3 days a week. When I started full-time and moved here, the only people whom I knew in town were Rosecrance staff… my supervisor, Ann Petty, literally helped me move.”
Carlene started as an intern working with adolescent girls at the Griffin Williamson Campus, and she has worked her way up through various positions across the organization. After her internship she worked as a primary counselor with the girls and then as a unit coordinator with the boys. She was then given the opportunity to supervise the women’s programming at the Harrison Campus for adults.
“I circled through all of the units at the Harrison Campus at some point,” Carlene said, “And re-did treatment schedules, and just made sure that we were doing evidence-based programming and doing the best that we could for the clients who were coming in through our doors.”
In 2017 Carlene was promoted to Clinical Director of Residential Services, where she developed programs for both adolescents and adults. In 2018 she was promoted to Regional Administrator, and she oversaw services in Milwaukee, McHenry County, Des Plaines, and Chicago. Most recently, Cardosi served as Vice President of Residential Services, and she supervised Rosecrance’s Griffin Williamson and Harrison campuses in Rockford and the Lakeview facility in Chicago.
“The problem of addiction is in your backyard, whether you think it is or not. I currently live in a small town in Wisconsin. Somebody a couple houses down from us passed away from an opiate addiction. This is a town of 9,000 people. Everybody there thinks it’s not happening close to them, but the truth is that it is going to affect your children, family or loved one. It’s not someone else’s problem, it’s our problem.
“There are a lot of full-circle moments for me. All of those pieces of your life that you think, ‘Why in the world did I have to go through all of these things?’ They all fell together into the life that I now have. I do know what it’s like to lose people to addiction. I do know what it’s like to be the family member, to love the person and hate the addiction. I have that empathy for all of those conflicting feelings.”