Behind the Business: Makona Therapy
KIMBERLY, Idaho (KMVT/KSVT) —Whether you want to improve your speaking skills or your children need help with language, speech therapy can benefit anyone.
“Makona to us means family,” Caroline Riley, owner of Makona Therapy says about the meaning of her clinic.
She started her speech therapy clinic when COVID hit and schools were shutting down.
“I had been working as a speech therapist in local school districts and, when everything shut down in March and I just kept getting the feeling like we needed to do something,” Riley explained. 3
Makona specializes in speech therapy for children, “Early, like childhood learning and language acquisition, we work on speech sounds.”
They also help older clients, “Things like swallowing after they’ve had some sort of incident, like a stroke, or we work on cognitive therapies.”
Makona Therapy is now going to be adding Occupational Therapists to help clients.
Riley said they’re the missing link in speech therapy, “They are able to do things to calm the body and to calm the brain that enables me to be able to get in what I need to to help them learn.”
The name Makona, comes from Riley’s children’s names put together, and helps her keep her family close.
She wants people to feel like they’re at home when being at the clinic, “That they were taking care of and that from our family to theirs.”
Something that Riley says makes this clinic unique is that they focus on the family as a whole, “When a child has an impairment of any kind, it affects everyone and and our job is to be here to bring the hope so that they know that when they come in here that everyone is taken care of, not just their one child.”
While working at Makona, Riley says she’s learned so many lessons from the children she’s worked with, but she recalls one of her favorite lessons, “Doesn’t matter who you are or where you are or where you came from or what right now looks like or what before looked like that, there is always always hope.”
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