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Brigit Dyer-Reynolds thought she was done with
social-service work. She’d performed well during her time with
Catholic Charities, but it had been a lot of responsibility and, at times,
a lot of frustration. When a little antique shop on Amos Street came up for
sale, just as she was looking for a change, it seemed the perfect
opportunity to move on to the next phase of her life. Antiques had always held a fascination for the
40-year-old mother of two. She’d gotten that from her mother and
grandmother but had never had a chance to do anything with it, beyond
touring flea markets and road shows. Now, with her own shop and her
husband’s blessing, she was getting the chance. Yet in the year and a half she’d spent selling,
buying, and maintaining the antique jewelry, glassware, and furniture that
populated the store, Dyer-Reynolds had not felt fulfilled. “I missed working with people,” she says.
“I like nice things and antiques, but I’m
more interested in people by far — I realize that now.”
So, despite having achieved what she’d thought
was her dream, Dyer-Reynolds found herself perusing the employment ads each
day. Soon she happened across an opening for someone to oversee I CARE
— the regional arm of the state ombudsman program, which advocates
for seniors in nursing homes. The job requirements were a match for her
education and experience.
Seeing that ad was like finding the puzzle piece that
makes the whole image come clear. Her Catholic upbringing, her
master’s degree in sociology, her time with Catholic Charities, and
even the time she’d spent at her store, where she often worked with
seniors and was drawn into their stories — it had all been leading
her to this.
She was born Brigit
Dyer, in Chicago, in 1963. Her father, Briggs Dyer, was an artist and a
professor at the Art Institute of Chicago. “I’m told he was on the forefront of the
abstract-expressionist movement in the Midwest in the mid-20th
century,” Dyer-Reynolds says. “LeRoy Neiman was a student of
his.”
Brigit was 6 when her parents’ marriage ended,
in 1969. She moved with her brother, Tony, and their mother, Janice, to
Saginaw, Mich., where they were raised amid family in the Catholic Church.
Janice remarried and had two more children. Briggs
Dyer died of heart failure in 1970. It was impressed on Dyer-Reynolds from a young age
that part of the Catholic mission was to help the poor and elderly. “I was taught it wasn’t good enough to
believe in Jesus,” she says. “You also have to be like Jesus. I
took that to heart.”
She was always a good student. After high school, she
attended Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant, where she worked as
a waitress while earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. In 1989, Dyer-Reynolds was recruited to Southern
Illinois University at Carbondale, to work on her doctorate. She met David
Reynolds, also a graduate student. They married and had two kids, Sam and
Emile, while attending school. “We were both working toward teaching at
universities,” Dyer Reynolds explains, “but then David’s
father passed away, leaving his mom needing help in Springfield. At the
same time, I had two little kids and no family support in Carbondale. So we
decided to move, both to support his mom and to have family around.”
It was 1996. Dyer-Reynolds didn’t get to finish her Ph.D.,
but she was content: “We loved Springfield. We wanted to raise our
kids here.”
David found work with the Illinois Department of
Education as a computer programmer. Though well educated, Dyer-Reynolds
found nothing in her field. She had to take a sales position at Famous-Barr
to get into the wage pool and work up from there. “We really
struggled for a while,” she recalls. The family began attending Mass at St. Agnes Church.
Although David and Brigit had drifted from the church years ago, the
responsibilities of parenthood brought them back. “I wanted the kids
to grow up in the faith,” Dyer-Reynolds says. In 1998, Dyer-Reynolds was working as an academic
advisor at Robert Morris College when that school consolidated and she
found herself looking for work. She saw an ad for a crisis-office
supervisor at Catholic Charities. “When I saw that job opening, I was
excited,” she says, “because I could put my faith into action
and do what I wanted to do — be an advocate for vulnerable
people.”
At Catholic Charities, Dyer-Reynolds worked with
people in economic crisis. “I worked under Sister Ann Carlino, a
winner of the Copley award,” she says. “She was the coordinator
of community services. I worked under her for about four months, and then
she informed us she was leaving for a mission in Africa.”
Dyer-Reynolds was surprised when Carlino encouraged
her to apply for the job vacancy. “I saw her as supremely capable and
didn’t know if I was ready,” Dyer-Reynolds says. “She had
confidence in me that I was.”
Dyer-Reynolds interviewed for the position and got
it. “Suddenly I was supervising the crisis office, St. John’s
Breadline, the Holy Family Food Pantry, St. Claire’s Health Clinic .
. . I was supervising six or seven programs,” she recalls, “but
I really enjoyed it. I loved it, and I believed in our mission.”
Dyer-Reynolds handled herself well at Catholic
Charities. Sarah Delano-Pavlick, then a member of the Catholic Charities
advisory board, says, “Brigit was a delight to work with. She was a
go-getter — very persistent and always advocating.”
Four years into the job, though, much of
Dyer-Reynolds’ enthusiasm was gone. “I was a little burned
out,” she concedes. “Catholic Charities could be bureaucratic
— the wheels turned slowly, and I had to go through five levels of
chain of command. It was a big responsibility, and I had young children at
home still.”
In the meantime, she had begun to frequent an antique
shop on Amos Street, owned by friends of her husband’s family. Now
that shop came up for sale. “I thought that was my passion, and I wanted to
follow it,” Dyer-Reynolds says.
CARE (Illinois Community Advocates for
Residents’ Empowerment), the program Dyer-Reynolds assumed charge of
when she put her antique shop up for sale, operates under the auspices of
the Illinois Department on Aging. It is run, however, by the Illinois
Retired Teacher’s Association Foundation. The foundation bid for the
service in 1992 and has held it since.
I CARE directly serves 8,000 nursing-home residents
in 12 counties, but because it encompasses the capital city it has a
palpable effect on the lives of more than 120,000 residents and their
families throughout the state. Dyer-Reynolds is well aware of the scope of her
responsibility. “I had always thought that, intellectually, I was up
to any challenge that was put before me,” she says, “but this
position has challenged me more than anything ever before.”
In 2004 there was an incident at a Springfield
facility in which a resident in his forties assaulted an elderly woman. A
concerned family member contacted I CARE. It came to light that the man had
been in prison for attempted murder and as an accomplice to murder and that
he was on parole at the time of the incident. “I couldn’t get anyone to tell me why a
violent ex-con was in a nursing home with frail elderly people,”
Dyer-Reynolds says. “I was appalled.”
“No one wanted to acknowledge it was a serious
problem,” she continues, “and that next time this man might
kill someone. I had people who had loved ones at that home, fearing for
their safety. They were saying, ‘What is the ombudsman program going
to do about this problem?’
“I talked to my supervisor at the Department on
Aging,” Dyer-Reynolds says. “She was a strong advocate to the
Illinois Department of Public Health and the Department of Corrections. I
think that’s how we finally got the felon out of there.”
Dyer-Reynolds is not sure of the man’s fate but
believes that he may have returned to prison after a parole violation. That incident was resolved, but it was not an
isolated case. “Right after that assault,” Dyer-Reynolds
explains, “there was an assault of a woman in Chicago that got a lot
of attention.”
The Chicago Sun-Times published a series of articles highlighting the placement
of parolees in nursing homes. The attorney general looked into the
phenomenon. Finally Rep. James D. Brosnahan, D-Oak Lawn, proposed
legislation requiring all Illinois nursing facilities to identify and
report residents with criminal backgrounds. The state ombudsman’s
office immediately took up the cause. “When the bill came up,” Dyer-Reynolds
explains, “the nursing-home industry felt it was overkill. We had
family members come to the Capitol and submit testimony.”
Dyer-Reynolds clarifies her role at the Capitol:
“I do this legislative advocacy work on behalf of IALTCO — the
Illinois Association of Long Term Care Ombudsmen — an association
that I am vice president of. I can’t lobby on behalf of the IRTAF,
because it is a not-for-profit, so I ‘educate’ on behalf of the
statewide association.”
Sally Patrone is the state ombudsman. She comments on
the efforts to pass Brosnahan’s bill: “Brigit was instrumental
in that effort — at the Capitol, working for passage. She made sure
the legislators knew there were residents who were offenders.”
The bill passed and became law in 2006. Previously it had been estimated that Illinois
nursing homes had a total of 50 to 100 felons living in them. After the
initial background checks (on current residents) were completed, the count
stood at roughly 1,100. “You have people in their eighties, and maybe
they stole a car in their teens,” Dyer-Reynolds says. “Those
aren’t the people we’re worried about. My concern — as
well as the other advocates — is that nursing homes were becoming
dumping grounds for felons and parolees. We saw that residents were at
risk. We advocated on behalf of that law and testified on behalf of
that.”
The program has been in place for a while now. “I think residents are safer,”
Dyer-Reynolds says. “If a home admits someone with a criminal
background, they need to show how they’re providing supervision,
treatment, or therapy. “Nursing homes do the background check,”
she says. “If it’s positive for a felony conviction, they send
that to the Department of Public Health for a risk analysis. If the risk is
low, no extra supervision is required. If it’s medium, they can admit
— but they have to provide supervision. The person can’t be
placed with a roommate.”
Dyer-Reynolds counts this as a success story for the
state of Illinois and for the ombudsman program. She, and the rest of the
ombudsman team, aren’t resting up, though. There are many more hills
to climb. “This is one that’s brought everyone
together,” she begins. “Nursing homes, families, advocates
— we’re trying to get the personal-needs allowance raised.
Currently, if a resident is on public aid, they get only $30 a month from
the Department of Healthcare and Family Services for personal needs. “Last summer we introduced a campaign to raise
that to $90 per resident. We spoke to legislators, had a petition drive
across the state . . . ”
Patrone elaborates: “Our statewide program
developed a petition. Brigit and her staff went to facility after facility,
and got signatures. We ended up compiling over 31,000 signatures in favor
of the bill. She also worked for the bill’s passage at the
Capitol.”
“People don’t understand what you have to
pay for,” Dyer-Reynolds says animatedly. “The majority of the
people aren’t using that money to buy cigarettes. They use it for
birthday cards, personal-care items, hair care. . . . Nursing homes
aren’t required to supply disposable undergarments. You have to buy
them out of your 30 dollars every month. Nursing homes make them pay for
cable, etc. Everybody has come together to say our residents need
more.”
She illustrates: “I love Diet Dr. Pepper. I
have a 16-ounce bottle every day. Thirty dollars wouldn’t be enough
to buy even that for me.”
Currently four bills are active in the Legislature.
Three propose increasing the allowance to $50, and Sen. A.J. Wilhemi,
D-Joliet, has proposed $90. “I think we did a good job with our
campaign,” Dyer-Reynolds says. “We got people talking, so the
Legislature took up the cause.” (Wilhemi’s bill is Senate Bill
1497.) Dyer-Reynolds credits IRTAF with doing an admirable
job since taking over I CARE. Margaret Niederer, Ph.D., director of special
projects for IRTAF until her retirement last year, brought the program on
board and did much to bring it up to its current standard. Dyer-Reynolds tells that story: “Dr. Niederer
had a family member in a nursing facility. She had some contact with the
ombudsman program and felt there were plenty of retired teachers who would
be in nursing homes someday, so she sold the idea to IRTAF. Then she wanted
to build up the volunteer base, and she did that. A lot of retired teachers
became volunteers.”
The ombudsman program is not a moneymaker,
Dyer-Reynolds says: “The foundation has put thousands of dollars
every year into the program.”
In July, Dyer-Reynolds was voted Ombudsman of 2006 at
the Elder Rights Conference, held in Chicago. “Bob and Phyllis Irvin, from this area, were voted
volunteers of year,” she notes. “I CARE has the largest
volunteer-ombudsman contingent of any ombudsman program in the state.
Volunteers serve as the main liaison between the nursing home residents and
the I CARE office.”
People considering becoming volunteers make several
visits with a seasoned ombudsman mentor to the facilities they will be
spending time at. In addition, they are required to attend six hours of
continuing education every year. “Volunteers are the heart and soul of the
program, and we could not be successful advocates without their
support,” Dyer-Reynolds says.
Dyer-Reynolds no longer
sees herself as unfulfilled. Her life is on an even keel. She honors her
father’s memory by serving on the board of the Old Capitol Art Fair.
Her husband, David, has a permanent appointment at Lincoln Land College,
teaching sociology. “He loves the school and the students,” she
says. “He’s the happiest I’ve seen him.”
Sam, now 15, is a high-school freshman. He plays
football and is in the band and on the honor roll. Emile, 12, is in the
seventh grade. She plays the piano and the flute. “A straight-A
student,” her proud mother notes. Dyer-Reynolds still has a spot in her heart for
antiques, but she knows where her true passion lies. She’s an
advocate, and she always will be.
“Can I just mention Bill 3508. . . ?” she
asks.
“This one will create a database of nursing
homes. Every licensed facility would be required to have a report online,
in an easy-to-access format. . . .”
Freelance writer Lawrence Crossett’s profile of
Scott Payne of the Inner City Mission appeared in the March 1 edition of Illinois Times.
This article appears in Apr 19-25, 2007.
