Help Hope Solutions Build an ABA Team Model Designed for Consistency, Care and Growth

According to Cristina Busu, founder of Help Hope Solutions, families seeking Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) are often looking for more than therapy sessions. They are looking for progress that carries into school, home life and long-term independence. They want consistency, trust and a team that understands both the science and the human side of care.

That philosophy is at the center of Help Hope Solutions. Built on a structured curriculum and a carefully developed clinical team, the organization emphasizes delivering the same standard of care across clinicians while still tailoring programs to each child.

ABA is widely used to teach practical skills that support communication, learning and independence. Busu describes it simply and clearly. “I believe it’s the best tool to teach skills that kids need in order to be independent, achieve academic success and potentially secure a job in the future,” she said.

Busu has worked in ABA since 2003, beginning in entry-level roles and advancing through the field before founding Help Hope Solutions. That experience shaped how she approached building the practice. From the outset, she wanted ABA to address all developmental domains, not just a narrow set of targets.

“When I first started Help Hope Solutions, I had a very specific goal,” Busu explained. “I wanted us to work on social skills and make sure we addressed all developmental domains. At the time, a lot of programs focused on just one area, like language, and that was it.”

Her background in early childhood disorders allowed her to combine multiple therapeutic approaches within ABA. “That’s how I created my own approach and my own curriculum,” she said. “The goal was to give kids foundational skills so they could go into school or any other setting their parents wanted them to succeed in.”

Busu notes that as demand grew, so did the need for a strong team. Help Hope Solutions now operates with a group of behavior analysts, typically fluctuating between six and 12 clinicians. For Busu, growth was never about speed. It was about standards.

“For a long time, we only hired behavior analysts from within,” she said. “That definitely slowed our growth, because we had to wait for people to get their degrees, but I knew they were implementing the curriculum and procedures exactly the way we wanted them to.”

Only recently did the practice begin hiring behavior analysts from outside the organization, and even then, the expectations remain clear. “They have to have a strong behavior analytic base, and they have to be willing to learn our way of doing things,” Busu said. The hiring process itself is intentionally rigorous. “Our interviews are very detailed,” she said. “We ask a lot of applied questions. They need to know the terminology, show they’ve used it and be open to learning. And beyond that, they need a positive attitude and good conversational skills, because they talk to parents a lot.”

This emphasis on alignment allows Help Hope Solutions to function as a cohesive unit rather than a collection of individual styles. Families work with clinicians who share the same curriculum, standards and expectations, even as staffing naturally evolves.

Within that structure, Busu’s role focuses on maintaining consistency and solving higher-level challenges. “I oversee all operations,” she said. “If a process isn’t working any more, we talk about it and change it.”

She is also deeply involved in curriculum development and advanced clinical decision-making. “I oversee all the curriculum development and upper-level staff training,” she explained. “If a child comes in and none of our existing programs fit, I’m the one who goes in and creates something from scratch.”

She also meets regularly with the behavior analyst team. “We have monthly meetings where we talk about whatever they need: higher-level cases, new topics, additional training,” she said. “It’s a space to support them and keep everyone aligned.”

Despite the complexity of ABA work, Busu encourages her team to view it through a balanced lens. “I always tell my staff that our job is equally science and art,” she said. “The science you learn from books. The art is learning how to apply it and make it work with real people.”

By building a team grounded in shared standards and supported by experienced oversight, Help Hope Solutions continues to show how a practice can grow without losing the consistency and care families depend on.