Ruth Taylor

She tirelessly crusades to give people with disabilities a better quality of life

f you know or love someone with disabilities, make sure you meet Ruth Taylor. She’s known as the person in Michigan to take on the system, point out inequities and tirelessly fight for changes.

    “She’s your gladiator, your crusader,” says Joe Dzenowagis, who’s known Taylor for 20 years. “She’s Michigan’s Crusader for People with Disabilities.

    “Like an old oak tree, you’re not going to move Ruth; she is going to move you.”

    Taylor, 76, is a co-founder of the Parent Monitoring Committee of the Association for the Macomb-Oakland Regional Center, a volunteer parent group that visits the homes of people with developmental disabilities.

    When the committee was founded in 1979, its work was unprecedented. The four-person committee formed a partnership with Macomb-Oakland Regional Center, while also being a watchdog over it.

    Group homes were just beginning to proliferate at the time, since people with developmental disabilities often were placed in state institutions and lived in regimented, sometimes wretched conditions without ever seeing much of the world. Taylor, mother of a son with cerebral palsy, helped champion the movement that took people out of these institutions so they could live in homes. Today, only 300 people live in state institutions.

    But the new group homes weren’t always the safest, and sometimes improvements could be made. So Taylor and other parents made and continue to make unannounced visits to these homes, ensuring they are safe and cozy.

    The program has since expanded with 25 people visiting more than 250 homes in Macomb and Oakland counties, with the goal of visiting each home four times a year.

    “Ruth is a great person,” says Dale Champion, a Harrison Township resident who has worked with Taylor for 15 years. “She is willing to work like a dog. She’s worked hard to keep this monitoring programing afloat.”

    Taylor’s work of making parent monitoring an integral part of quality assurance in group homes has inspired and prompted visits from parents and professionals throughout the world, including New Zealand, England, Hungary and Japan.

    It also has garnered her a slew of awards, including the nation’s highest honor for volunteer service, the President’s Service Award, which was bestowed on her last year.

    Even though she has had two knees replaced along with a hip, Taylor continues to recruit more people to be involved in parent monitoring and is fighting for higher salaries for care givers in the homes.

    She is also reluctant to take the Michiganian of the Year award without sharing it with others.

    “If it wasn’t for the people working with me, I wouldn’t be getting this award,” she says. “I’m getting this for all of those people in the past and the present who have worked so diligently keeping this committee on top and doing its work.”

   

— Kim Kozlowski