Daniel Darting sees leading Signal Behavioral Health Network less as a job than as an act of stewardship, and as a commitment to service above anything.
"What a gift to be a part of something that is weighty," he says, reflecting on the responsibility that comes with the role.
Third Horizon’s Impact Story series profiles leaders at our client organizations. In this story, we are highlighting Daniel Darting, CEO of Signal Behavioral Health Network — one of the organizations helping ensure behavioral health services reach Coloradans who are uninsured or underinsured.
Leadership as a Trust
The word Darting keeps returning to is entrusted.
"Our values as an organization [are] that we want to do the best that we can with what we’re entrusted with," he says. Especially in a nonprofit, he adds, that is "really a commitment to service above anything."
In a safety net, the consequences of falling short are real. The problems, Darting says, are "deeply consequential to people." But he is equally clear that many of the barriers people encounter are within our power to change.
"Most of the barriers that we have in place are those of our own creation," he says. "The people who interact with those problems are often the ones capable of changing it."
His perspective on the status quo is similarly direct: "The status quo is not an invisible force in the universe. The status quo is a collective decision to do nothing, or to do the same thing that we’ve been doing."
That sense of responsibility extends to how Darting thinks about Signal itself. Asked what it would mean for the people Signal serves if the organization were not there, he turns the question outward.
"We should look at ourselves as replaceable, and we should look at our colleagues as indispensable and treat them that way," he says. "But while we’re here, we are going to do our level best to make it count."
What Signal Does
For almost 30 years, Signal has worked in Colorado’s behavioral health safety net.
Signal does not deliver care directly. As one of the state’s Behavioral Health Administrative Service Organizations (BHASOs), it is contracted by the Colorado Behavioral Health Administration to manage and monitor behavioral health services for residents who are uninsured or underinsured.
The BHASO model addresses a longstanding challenge: fragmentation. Historically, substance use disorder services, crisis services, community mental health services, and other supports operated through different networks and administrators. Each met an important need, but transitioning between those systems became another barrier to care.
BHASOs bring those networks into a regional structure encompassing mental health and substance use treatment, recovery supports, crisis services, and care coordination. The goal is a more accessible and approachable system, organized around whole-person health rather than program boundaries.
Administrative work of this kind is easy to overlook, precisely because it succeeds by being invisible. When it works, a person in crisis encounters one system rather than four.
The Work at Third Horizon
Third Horizon has worked with Signal for years, led by Managing Director Mindy Klowden.
Klowden’s approach to the work is rooted in years of experience in community-based organizations. In college, she helped start and manage a campus soup kitchen, where conversations with the people it served revealed where our systems were failing people. She later spent 12 years at a community mental health center before moving into consulting.
That experience shaped how she approaches consulting today. The consultants she valued most, she says, were the ones who listened — who did not arrive pretending to know all the answers, but who brought both subject matter expertise and resources to help the organization find its own way forward.
For Klowden, the most meaningful work grows from longstanding relationships like Third Horizon’s with Signal — helping an organization manage change, understand policy, and identify opportunities for greater impact.
She describes Darting as a tremendous, mission-driven leader committed to serving the people of Colorado, who has worked to strategically grow Signal in the service of people.
Watch the Conversation
In this Impact Story, Third Horizon’s Erica Bauer sits down with Daniel Darting and Mindy Klowden to talk about what leadership requires inside a complicated system and what keeps each of them in it.
Watch the conversation.