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“SALUTE TO JOAN ROSS: FOR AN OUTSTANDING 26-YEAR CAREER IN COMMUNITY SERVICE TO WEST VIRGINIA” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E1253-E1254 on June 15, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
SALUTE TO JOAN ROSS: FOR AN OUTSTANDING 26-YEAR CAREER IN COMMUNITY
SERVICE TO WEST VIRGINIA
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HON. NICK J. RAHALL II
of west virginia
in the house of representatives
Wednesday, June 14, 1995
Mr. RAHALL. Mr. Speaker, after serving southern West Virginia as head of the Southwestern Community Action Agency in Huntington, WV for 26 years, Joan Ross has made her decision to retire in order to spend more time with her husband, her children, and her grandchildren.
While her time and talents have been devoted almost solely to the Community Action Council which she has headed for 26 years, developing and implementing many ``poverty programs'' for the most needy people throughout southern West Virginia, Joan Ross began her public service prior to the 1964 enactment of the Economic Opportunity Act creating local and regional CAP agencies.
Joan first spearheaded a local demonstration project called Project Find, a research and demonstration program under which she trained older, low-income persons who had not dreamed of being called upon to show the kind of professional skill required of survey takers, and under Joan's supervision were more than able to conduct the necessary random survey, using a 22-page questionnaire, throughout a three-county area--Lincoln, Wayne, and Cabell. The findings determined by the questionnaires indicated specifically what and how extensive the human service needs were throughout the area, and how best to provide for those needs. Joan Ross followed up by developing a delivery system
[[Page E1254]] for those human services, and she also wrote a report to Congress on her findings, entitled: ``The Golden Years: A Tarnished Myth.'' Joan had found that the Golden Years for the elderly were not exactly golden--but she also knew what kind of help was going to be necessary in order to make them golden.
After that effort, Joan then served as the coordinating supervisor of the Neighborhood Youth Corps, responsible for developing and implementing an internal evaluation instrument, and recommending to management appropriate changes to make the program more efficient and effective for the youth intended to be served. These findings too became a written report to the U.S. Department of Labor and were used extensively to improve and enhance neighborhood youth corps programs.
In 1967, Joan became the interim executive director of the Southwestern Community Action Council, where she got so busy doing what needed to be done, she never left--until now.
Joan Ross knew long before Federal legislation was enacted, that West Virginia's southern area was very different from the rest of the Nation. More than 63 percent rural, the State had hidden poverty pockets that neighboring urban areas and officials knew nothing about, or not enough to pay attention.
When, in 1964, the Economic Opportunity Act was passed creating her agency, community schools and businesses, restaurants and movie theaters--were not yet integrated. Hungry school children were not receiving hot lunches, and health care was nonexistent in most rural areas. At that time, the mentally impaired or disabled child and adult were not mainstreamed into society--but were kept hidden, either in institutions or by their families. In 1964, Joan had already found that substandard housing was accepted as a consequence of poverty, but not as a contributing factor, and people who were poor were perceived as poor by choice--but Joan Ross knew better.
The enactment of the Economic Opportunity Act gave Joan Ross, and many other directors of CAP agencies nationwide the opportunity to bring people together who were concerned about their communities--their counties, cities and rural hamlets--people who wanted to find a way to help the poor help themselves.
Joan, along with the staff which she recruited and who have served with her for nearly the same length of years at Southwestern, took it upon herself to become a pioneer in Lyndon Johnson's war on Poverty, taking on new programs that no one else would touch--and making them work as they were intended to work: Helping the poor to help themselves.
The people in southern West Virginia, brought together by Joan Ross and kept together by her unstinting efforts over the years, were somewhat awed by the sight of bankers working with welfare mothers, rural folks with urban folks--young people with senior citizens--and volunteers with working people.
When Joan Ross began her service with the Southwestern Community Action Agency as its interim director 26 years ago, her job was to help organize and stabilize the agency. Over more than a quarter century, she has seen the program grow from a tenuous one to a multi-million dollars corporation-still receiving Federal support from a few remaining programs under the old OEA--but which has grown and continued to survive because of the resources she has generated from other Federal programs, from private foundations, and local contributions.
Under her very distinguished stewardship, the Southwestern Community Action Agency has done everything from weatherizing existing substandard housing, to building housing projects, for the elderly, for the low-income families, for the homeless, and for the mentally impaired.
She pioneered the Head Start Program in our region, overseeing four county-wide Head Start Projects, as well as Head Start's Parent Child Centers, providing educational opportunities to pre-school children and their families, saw to the fluoridation of the water system, advocated for the mentally ill, conducted several national demonstrations, some of which have resulted in Federal legislation, provided services to the homeless and to troubled youth, provided training which has led to jobs for the unemployed, helped provide small low interest loans to low income people who were trying to start up their own business--and she piloted countless other programs designed to help the poor stop being poor.
The story of Joan Ross and her career in public service is about excellence. When it comes to bringing people together from all walks of life and inspiring them--challenging them--to work together and to make a big difference, she has no equal. Joan Ross did all this regardless of anyone's cultural, ethnic, or racial origins. She did it regardless of a person's age, or whether they were from rural or urban settings, and all other socio-economic factors were taken into consideration for residents throughout her service area.
Joan Ross's life has been about uniting people, never dividing them.
While Joan spent 26 years counseling, cajoling, inspiring and challenging people from all walks of life--from County Commissions to the State Legislature to the U.S. Congress--from the poorest to the richest in our region--ultimately getting them to do the right thing--
she was completely and selflessly involved at every other level of community service. How she found the time or the energy, we will never know. For example: During these 26 years Joan served as a member of the Junior League of Huntington, was active in her church, served as chairperson of the board of trustees of the greater West Virginia Employees Health and Welfare Trust, served as president of the WV Community Action Directors Association, served on the Greenbrier Mission Development Fund, was chairperson of the State Visiting Committee of West Virginia University, as chairperson of the Cabell-
Huntington Red Cross, as the national vice president of the Council of Agriculture Research, Extension and Training, served on the West Virginia Mental Health Planning Committee, as well as with the West Virginia Alliance for the Mentally Ill, as president of the Prestera Center for Mental Health, Chaired the Policy Committee of the WV State Jobs Training Coordinating Council, president of the Forest Management Corporation, and still serves as a member of the Huntington Hospital for Rehabilitation Board of Directors. And all this time, Joan was raising her four children and being a supportive wife to her husband, Dr. Thomas Ross.
I have known Joan Ross for all of these years, and have been both inspired and humbled by her always dynamic, often gentle and compassionate approach to getting all the jobs done that were hers to do, and getting them done by, and for, the right people. By her example she brought dignity and a quality of life to thousands of men, women and children in southern West Virginia who had, until Joan began her life-long career of outreach to the poor, remained immersed in poverty.
She will be sorely missed as she returns to the heart of her family to spend some quality time with them--but knowing Joan, she will always be involved in the affairs of her community and indeed in public affairs throughout the State.
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