Remembering Gladys Burns, who provided the vision for Thurston County’s social safety net
Gladys Burns spent 40 years in this community, and was the consummate citizen activist, combating poverty, discrimination, mental illness, child abuse and neglect. She and her mountaineering husband also were key founders, financiers and lifetime members of Olympia’s Unitarian Universalist Congregation.
Burns was a legendary figure in Thurston County at the time of her death in 1994, but far too many of her accomplishments are unrecorded and available only in the fading memories of those who knew and remember her. For a time, there were scholarships and awards named for her, but today even those have disappeared.
This is one of many reasons why we need Women’s History Month.
The first recorded impact of Gladys Burns (1907-1994) in Thurston County was in the 1940s, when she helped establish a local Mental Health Association. She wrote of that work from 1940 to 1970, and notes that when they began, “Mental health services were practically nonexistent.” There was no psychiatrist in either Thurston or Mason counties. There were no programs to serve patients returning from Western State Hospital, and no services for children. None.
She and the people she recruited to the cause toiled for six years to create a mental health center. They held fundraisers, put on plays, and solicited donations from local businesses. After several more years of relentless advocacy, federal and state funding finally became available.
That was just the beginning. Today, no one can remember how many nonprofits Burns founded or inspired others to found. There were many. But those who knew her clearly recall that she was a prime mover in the establishment of the local United Way — she served as its first paid staff — and in the creation of the area’s first child care center and early learning program, the Family Support Center, as well as the Crisis Clinic.
She also took her work home. Her granddaughter remembers Burns taking calls from parents in distress when it was her turn to staff the all-volunteer precursor of today’s Crisis Clinic.
Burns responded to specific problems — like the need for a crisis nursery, and for laws and programs to combat all forms of child abuse. But she also pushed people to see the big picture of how organizations — both nonprofit and governmental — could work together to create a tightly knit safety net that could help people rise out of intergenerational poverty, and keep people from falling into it.
“She set the tone, the philosophy,” says Shelly Willis, executive director of the Family Education and Support Services. “And she was the first person who showed me that women had a voice and can make a difference. When she was in the room, I sat up straight.”
Maureen Fitzgerald, a former social services agency director, says, “She scoped out everybody, and would say ‘You’re the person who needs to do this.’ She wasn’t tolerant of the word can’t. She was always inspiring and pushing from the back at a time when most agency directors were men. She could shift people’s thinking about what was possible. She had a clear vision, and invited people into that vision. This was at a time when there were very few local nonprofits and an empty playing field for social services.”
Burns also became a skilled lobbyist. In addition to nudging forward the state’s progress in social and health services and anti-poverty programs, she championed state measures to lighten the disproportionate tax burden on low-income people. Around 1980, she helped found and run People for Fair Taxes. She was also the only woman who testified before Congress on federal tax reform in 1984.
Gladys Burns was the visionary architect of our local human services system. Her living legacy is immense. Thousands of people in poverty or crisis — past, present and future — benefit from her work. She also inspired many women to think bigger about how capable they were, and what they could achieve.
She deserves to be remembered.
