The Company
“BRAIN LAUNCH, L3C” was founded in 2016. An L3C is a social enterprise which bridges the gap between a nonprofit and a ‘for profit’ company. Our number one goal is to accomplish our social mission!
Social Mission
To provide services that will enable a child to learn more rapidly, effectively, and efficiently, which will help them actualize their true potential.
Our Vision
To help reduce the epidemic number of children with attention and learning difficulties, which will enable more children to experience more personal successes, achieve their aspirations and contribute more to society in the future.
We will accomplish our Mission & Vision by:
• Educating parents on the best strategies for best brain development in the early years.
• Providing programs that strengthen the information processing systems of the brain that are vital for good learning, thinking and everyday life performance to take place.
• Partner with an organization that has the infrastructure and customer base to deliver our programs in an efficient and effective manner.
• Applying for grants with our delivery partner, so we can provide our programs to young students whose family cannot afford the cost of the programs.
Dr. Don Helms, Founder
Dr. Don Helms Founder
President
Dr. Helms brings over 25 years of clinical research and product development experience to BRAIN LAUNCH and began his professional career as a Developmental/Behavioral Optometrist. This is a branch of optometry that deals with child and cognitive development. Developmental/Behavioral Optometrists have been doing sensory motor and cognitive therapy as far back as the 1960s. Developmental/Behavioral Optometrists and Occupational Therapists are the true pioneers in the Cognitive Training or the Brain Fitness Industry.
Dr. Helms began providing visual processing and cognitive development programs in 1992. He realized that if he was going to make a major impact on the epidemic number of children experiencing attention and learning problems, he would have to take a multidisciplinary approach when creating his developmental programs. He began to devoir as much current and viable research on learning and cognitive development from a variety of disciplines to create his learning models, theories and developmental programs. He began conducting clinical studies in 2003 to refine his new learning models and cognitive development programs and the results obtained with his programs were outstanding.
In Dr. Helms’ clinical research setting, students with case histories of learning and/or attention problems were administered Dr. Helms’ Developmental Program. Approximately 70% of the procedures were done face-to-face, one-on-one and 30% were done on a computer. The average improvement in the development of cognitive skills was over 4 years and improvement in IQ averaged 18 points, in less than 40 hours of training. Pre and post-test results were obtained using the highly respected Woodcock-Johnson III Cognitive Battery. These results were impressive, but more important was the positive feedback we received from parents and teachers. The positive feedback confirmed that the program results transferred to real life performance, which is what really matters.
In Peter Kline’s book “Why America’s Children Can’t Think”, Mr. Kline states:
“Dr. Don Helms, whose program is called ACHIEVE, has substantially raised the IQs of all his students he has worked with … Intellectual training of this type should become a staple of all elementary education, and can even be used in adult education.”
Dr. Helms designed a developmental program in 2005 in which the child does all the program exercises on a computer, but he has realized over time that in society today, attention and information processing systems must be developed in a face-to-face, real 3-dimensional setting, not on a screen, to be most effective. The reason for this is that attention skills needed to pay attention to a screen are much different than the attention skills needed to pay attention in the 3-dimensional world. A three-year old can pay attention to a screen, but most children today cannot pay attention to a teacher talking in front of the class in the real 3-dimensional world.
The new BRAIN LAUNCH programs are the result of Dr. Helms’ continued research. We expect even better results with our new programs.
Shelly Helms Co-Founder
Director of Customer Relations
Shelly Helms brings over 20 years of business management and customer relationship experience to the BRAIN LAUNCH team. She was the Co-Founder of Vision Fitness Center, a multi-site optometric clinic. As the V.P. of Clinical Operations, she gained experience and success in leadership, team-building, and devising and implemented strategies for the best business practices while creating the highest level of patient care and satisfaction.
From there, Shelly went on with Dr. Helms to become a Co-Founder of Learning Performance Institute; a learning center that specialized in the assessment and cognitive development of children and adolescents. Shelly was responsible for cognitive testing, the hiring and training of cognitive development trainers and conducting workshops for parents. It was through her years of hands on experience that Shelly was able to contribute to the content and methodology of the new advanced BRAIN LAUNCH programs.
Alex V Las Casas Co-Founder
Director of Technology & Information
Alex started a computer-based graphics business in 1993. In the course of his education and experience prior to that time, he earned a couple of business degrees and added some computer technology courses to prepare for the rapidly changing business environment. Of course, at that time the only computer in town was a mainframe that took up the first floor of a building. It ran punch-cards to enter programs which were punched, on a machine that looked like a large typewriter, by the programmer/coder.
After college Alex worked in national and international sales. Managing an industrial sales team of inside and outside salespeople he used a portable pc running DOS on the road and an IBM 360 in the office. They were the latest and greatest at that time.
When he started his new business Alex started working with Apple computers which were used for all the company’s design and production work serving the needs of some of the largest advertising agencies and yellow pages phone book publishers in North America. As the President and IT Director, Alex built and managed a multi-location network for his business. In the beginning, the ads were shipped on Velox made from negatives processed in-house. Later, they provided Yellow Pages ads directly to the publishers via the industry’s highly secured internet ‘pipeline’.
As that industry matured and died, the internet grew and Alex stayed focused on learning to provide the many services needed by businesses to build and maintain a vibrant and dynamic internet presence. A self-proclaimed renaissance man, Alex deeply enjoys his work and learning new things every day to provide website and app design, programming, search engine optimization, SEM, social marketing and more.
Working together with all the Brain Launch project stakeholders, the Brain Launch team is excited to learn and grow with our members, staff, vendors, and our society building a better future.