Focus on the Family began as a radio program with no organization behind it at all, just James Dobson recording a weekly segment in Arcadia, California in 1977. As the broadcast grew, so did the practical need for an institution to run it, and the organization that took shape around the program in its first several years bore its name.
Growth compounded through the 1980s. A monthly magazine launched in 1983 gave the ministry a print voice between broadcasts. Adventures in Odyssey, a children's radio drama launched in 1987, extended the organization's reach to a much younger audience and would go on to become one of the longest running children's radio dramas in American broadcasting. A syndicated newspaper column under Dobson's own byline followed in 1992, and a website arrived in 1997 as the organization's media footprint kept expanding well beyond its original single radio program.
The organization outgrew Southern California along the way. In 1991 Focus on the Family relocated its headquarters to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where a large dedicated campus gave the growing staff, and the growing list of subsidiary ministries the organization was launching internationally, a permanent home. By the time Dobson stepped down as president and chief executive in 2003, the single radio program he had started in a rented office fourteen years earlier had become a multinational ministry with a magazine, a children's drama, a newspaper column and operations in dozens of countries.