Focus on the Family

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.

James Dobson led Focus on the Family for twenty six years as president and chief executive before stepping down from that role in 2003, remaining on as board chairman for several more years. Jim Daly took over as president in 2005 while Dobson still chaired the board, an overlap that gave the organization years to work out a leadership transition before Dobson's full departure. Dobson resigned the chairmanship in February 2009 and left the organization entirely in early 2010, more than three decades after founding it.

The transition did not end the flagship broadcast. Daly took over hosting duties on the daily program that still carries the Focus on the Family name, continuing a format Dobson had built and refined for over three decades, now presented by someone who had not created it. The broadcast, along with the magazine, Adventures in Odyssey and the organization's international subsidiary ministries, continued largely unchanged in structure even as its most identifiable public voice departed.

Focus on the Family declared itself a church for United States tax purposes in 2017, a status distinct from how it describes its own religious identity, which remains that of an evangelical Protestant parachurch ministry rather than a congregation. The organization today employs several hundred staff and operates in dozens of countries, run by a leadership Dobson himself did not select for the long term, on a broadcast still carrying the name he gave it in a rented California office in 1977.