Funding for children in foster care with special needs statewide has been boosted and made more equitable after years of languishing, thanks to the efforts of Jim Scherrer.
The executive director of Child and Family Services of Northwestern Michigan, Scherrer worked tirelessly on education, advocacy and outreach about this issue with the state legislature and Department of Human Services last year. The result was that they found funding in a tight state budget and laid the groundwork for future improvements.
In honor of his service and tenacity, the Michigan Federation for Children and Families named Scherrer Advocate of the Year last month.
"This recognition was a surprise to me," noted Scherrer, who has worked in the human services field for more than three decades. "Part of it is that representatives from our board of directors traveled to Lansing to meet with our legislators and the director of the Department of Human Services."
"In a sense, advocacy is a full-court press: it's never one person that does anything," he added. "What [the award] really recognizes is that we kept the issue in front of people over a long time, we were patient and persistent."
The Michigan Federation for Children and Families is a statewide non-profit association of about 40 nonprofit agencies such as Child and Family Services. The organization does not grant an advocacy award every year. But Scherrer's extraordinary efforts, ideas and solutions throughout 2005 made giving him one a natural choice, noted Elizabeth Carey, executive director of the nonprofit federation.
"We decided it was worth doing a formal recognition of him," she said. "He had been working for years trying to figure out how to address this. It's not done yet, but he did an amazing amount of work and he's on a whole bunch of continuing committees with the Department of Human Services trying to address rate issues."
To Scherrer, spearheading a breakthrough that helps children and service agencies statewide is part and parcel of his duties as executive director of a northwest Michigan agency. He has worked at the agency, which serves between 400-500 children a year in 13 counties, for 26 years and took over as executive director in 2002.
Scherrer has seen his leadership role broaden over the years to include more advocacy at the state level. His passion is to ensure that children's issues stay in the spotlight with decision makers in the state.
"What I'd like to see is that children in higher states of need get more of a share of the state's revenues than they get now," he noted. "It is absolutely an investment down the road."
Scherrer began his career as a mental health worker near Kalamazoo after graduating from Western Michigan University in 1972 with a master's degree in psychology. He worked in substance abuse field and was a child therapist for a mental health agency before moving north in 1979. Child and Family Services of Northwestern Michigan hired him as a foster care worker in 1980 and he never looked back.
"My experience and degree translated into providing care for abused and neglected kids very easily," said Scherrer, who lives in Northport with his wife and teenage son; a daughter is away at college.
"In mental health you see a lot of the same kids as a therapist in the therapy realm," he continued. "When you're in an agency, you're helping them get all the pieces together and helping the parents around all the abuse and neglect issues that got them into foster care initially. Trying to rebuild the family."
Reflecting on his career serving neediest children and families, Scherrer gives the state a mixed review in making children a priority. While acknowledging the reality of the current tight budget, he believes that children's issues in general don't have a high enough priority.
"As evidence, every day we're seeing teachers get laid off or children's programs getting funding cut or really having inadequate funding for agencies that provide children's services, whether in child welfare, children's mental health or schools," Scherrer said.
The rural perspective needs to be brought to the attention of state officials as part of his work in education and advocacy.
"We're from primarily a rural area and sometimes the issues in rural community take a back seat to policies and funding that is driven by our urban areas," noted Scherrer. "They have different needs and it's completely different in how they provide service to people, especially when we're providing them in their homes and communities over hundreds of square miles instead of a concentrated community."