Hacienda Healthcare

Why Choose Hacienda?

We provide a comprehensive range of services including 24-hour nursing and respiratory care; physical, occupational and speech therapy; and social and dietary services.

Hacienda HealthCare specializes in services for medically fragile and chronically ill infants, children, teens, and adults in Arizona, providing every human being we are granted the privilege to serve with exceptional and compassionate care.

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Ensuring your safety

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Regularly Audited

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Strict security

Our History

The year was 1967. Ilene Butler, a single woman living in Phoenix who had spent years caring for children with special needs, learned that because she was not married, she would not be allowed to adopt a child.

Determined, Ilene petitioned the state of Arizona to become a foster parent to children who had been abandoned and institutionalized. Her request was approved and Ilene Butler soon became a foster mom to three youngsters – two children with developmental and physical disabilities and a three-year-old girl with hydrocephalus, or a fluid accumulation in her brain.

Delighted to finally be a “mom,” Ilene began a new chapter of her life living with the children in her mobile home.

She had found her calling: To provide a loving home for “her little angels,” as she often referred to them. Ilene understood that many more children needed the loving care she provided, so she opened her home to more special children in need. She hired nurses and recruited family members. She soon had 10 children under her care – which is when she encountered zoning issues at the mobile home park.

With the help of her attorney, Steve Friedman, Ilene applied for an institutional license and incorporated her business as a non-profit 501C3 organization.

Ilene called that business “Hacienda de los Angeles” – literally the “Home of the Angels. By 1970, she had 19 children, 10 employees and many volunteers. She leased a larger house in Phoenix, and turned to friends, family and her church for more help and more volunteers.

Miraculously, a member of Ilene’s church was willing to donate six acres of land at 1402 E. South Mountain Avenue. A group of ladies from the congregation, the “Madrinas,” raised $40,000 to support the construction of the first facility on the western end of the property – with more support from friends, family and the Arizona National Guard.

In 1976, 35 children moved into their new 8,000 square foot home. In 1988, newly federal regulations required the construction of a new facility, which was built immediately east of the original building. These two buildings became one of Arizona’s first certified Intermediate Care Facilities for Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities.

Ilene Butler passed away in 1995 at the age of 59. But the organization, which became Hacienda Healthcare in 2006, remains inspired by her memory, her heart and her endless love for children.

“To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.”

–Unknown