by Eric Freedman
May 16, 2009

Sharon Parks. Photos by David Trumpie

While the ranks of some of Lansing’s long-powerful interest groups are shrinking — manufacturers, auto dealers and farmers among them — Sharon Parks is witnessing the dizzyingly rapid growth of her own constituency: the poor, the undernourished, the homeless, the sick, the uninsured. And in her arena, such growth is bad news.

The reasons are starkly splashed in black and white on the front pages of the state’s newspapers: "Padnos layoffs second in 100 years," the Holland Sentinel reports. "Penguin to cut 150 jobs," the Sturgis Journal tells readers. "Mantex closes plant," the County Press in Lapeer announces. On three days in the span of a week, the Daily News in Greenville hammered home the local impact of the recession with "Mueller Brass cuts employees," "United Solar cuts production" and "Northland lays off 27 amid expansion." Another indicator of the growing number of the needy: almost 1.42 million state residents in more than 679,000 households were receiving food assistance as of March. By comparison, the average monthly food assistance caseload in 2000 was 253,887, benefiting 580,308 people.

During more than 30 years with the advocacy group Michigan League for Human Services, Parks has watched the situation get better and worse — more often worse than better — for her constituency. “Bad times in Michigan are busy times for social services folks, and these are particularly trying times now.”

Founded in 1912 as the Conference on Charities and Corrections, the League is a $1.3-million-a-year nonpartisan operation with a staff of 14, full- and part-time. Most of its budget comes from foundations, both national and in Michigan. Despite the hard times, it logged a 17-percent increase in end-of-year giving in 2008 with a number of first-time donors. While aggressively pursuing new money sources, Parks acknowledges the chilled fundraising climate for charities and nonprofits. “We’re all going to the same wells for money. It’s tough for community-based organizations that are seeing reductions in state funding at the same time more people are coming though their doors.”

Even former donors are now looking for help. As an example, she cites the United Way of Southeast Michigan, which recently announced the layoff of 43 employees and said it intends to reduce support for some charitable partners to close its $10-million shortfall.

Western roots
Parks has lived in Michigan since 1967, but her roots are in the West: born in Salt Lake City, high school in the San Francisco area and her first year of college in Colorado. She married at 19 and moved to Monroe, where her husband got a job with the county social services department. She began her own career as a reporter, columnist and photographer for a weekly newspaper in Monroe, took community college classes and moved to Lansing in 1969.

She finished her journalism degree at Michigan State University and joined the League as a policy analyst in 1977. “It was a really good place to start to work. I had a young daughter and didn’t like the hours reporters have,” she says. She later became vice president for policy and, now, president and chief executive officer.

The League is headquartered in a squat, nondescript office building in a mixed industrial-residential section of Lansing a few blocks off Interstate 496 and closer to Potter Park Zoo than to the Capitol. Her own sparsely decorated office has industrial-looking carpet, fluorescent ceiling lights and family photos. She does have a poster of Georgia O’Keefe’s “Morning Glory with Black” from a Cleveland Museum of Art exhibition hanging on the wall, as well as a 1960 watercolor of the Capitol that was in the office when she assumed the presidency. Framed on her desk is a handwritten note from Gov. Jennifer Granholm congratulating Parks as “Madame President” when she became the organization’s top executive.

Yet Parks took the post only reluctantly, according to former state Rep. H. Lynn Jondahl, who worked with the group when he was a legislator and now chairs its board of directors. “When we went to fill the position with the retirement of Ann Marston last year, we had to plead with Sharon to put herself forward,” he recalls. “She was doing the policy stuff, which she liked to do, which she was comfortable doing, and we had to do a recruiting job to get her to step into that leadership role.”

Jondahl describes her major role over the years as development of the organization’s policy on advocacy on behalf of vulnerable populations. “She’s articulate and assertive,” he says, “but in personal terms she’s not a flamboyant person at all. She’s kind of matter-of-fact, comfortable dealing with data and reality.”

Laughingly, Park describes herself as a “news junkie — it sounds so pathetic.” She recently subscribed to some more magazines, including the lifestyle-oriented Real Simple, to broaden her normal readings, which tend towards such publications as Newsweek and The New York Times.

She says that economic gloom and doom now reach deep into every corner of the state, but that reality hasn’t softened the hearts of most conservative legislators. “The real ideologues are very averse to our message, both on the needs of low-income people and to ensure we have resources to meet those needs.” Meanwhile, she gives high marks to Granholm for trying to protect the poorest of Michigan’s poor because “she deeply believes in the importance of the public safety net for the most vulnerable.”

Capitol viewpoints
Parks is no fan of term limits, saying rapid turnover at the Capitol makes it tough for lawmakers to fully grasp the complexity of the League’s issues. “They don’t have the depth of understanding of our public sector safety net and who is served and who isn’t. They’re not in office long enough to get that depth.” For example, most legislators don’t know “how poor you need to be to get cash assistance,” she says. And term limits mean the impending departure of such backers as Sens. Deborah Cherry (D-Burton) and Michael Switalski (D-Roseville). Term limits forced another long-time ally, Bob Emerson, from the Senate. He’s now Granholm’s budget director.

At the same time, she’s happy not to be seeing the type of get-tougher-on-the-poor attitude and policies so common in the past, although the state did some tightening up as recently as 2006 by setting more restrictive time limits than the federal government on welfare benefits. “We’re not hearing calls to do more of that right now.”

And in at least certain limited arenas, she sees some support for strengthening pieces of the safety net. One was the Michigan Chamber of Commerce’s demand earlier this year for faster processing of unemployment insurance claims, a demand that the Granholm administration responded to promptly. But she doesn’t see similar business sector support for improving the way state government handles claims for welfare and other forms of assistance. “We’ve always had this ‘deserving’ and ‘not deserving’ poor,” she says of that dichotomy. “People respond differently to a poor mom trying to feed her kids and who has been unemployed a long time.”

Inside Michigan Politics editor Bill Ballenger is less optimistic, or perhaps more realistic, about changing GOP minds, particularly in the Senate where the party retains control. “I still think, rightly or wrongly, that the Republican mantra is ‘how do you bring jobs back to Michigan and maybe start employing some of these people who are really suffering? You do through traditional mechanisms of tax cuts and downsizing government.’”

Ballenger sees Parks — whom he describes as a “true believer” — and the League as “almost sounding a little more desperate than usual. They’re afraid they’re getting left behind with all these efforts in the legislature, the stimulus package.” And despite the spreading economic pain, Ballenger doesn’t foresee that “somehow people are going to get sympathetic at last to the dispossessed. I just don’t see the legislature making a policy decision to help these people.”

The League acknowledges that its battles are still being waged uphill.

Jondahl notes that it took years of lobbying to persuade the legislature to enact an earned income tax credit for the working poor in 2006, effective for the 2008 tax year. That success, he said, may be due to a “growing recognition of the vulnerable population, the working poor, people living right on the fringes.” He hedges, though: “On the other hand, there could be other ways to read that, and there are not a whole lot of trophies. It’s hard to say there’s a greater understanding of vulnerable people.”

In recent years, the League has been forging alliances with groups that traditionally weren’t involved in its issues, including the Michigan Municipal League, the Presidents Council, State Universities of Michigan, and education and labor organizations. “We’ve come together in a collective response to the ongoing structural deficit and the notion we can continue to cut taxes,” Parks explains. “We need revenue solutions, not more cuts.”

Sharon Parks

Local government officials became allies with the League as the state continued to freeze revenue sharing, leading to cuts in local police and fire departments and closure of senior centers. Public university presidents became allies as higher education became less and less affordable. “These are quality-of-life issues,” she explains, and they include “lots of public services, not just for the poor.” She continues, “We have to move past ideology and look at the problems confronting all people in the state, not just business, not just well-off people.”

Thus its backing to extend the sales tax to services. Thus its call for mandatory legislative review of all tax breaks — the League labels them “tax expenditures” — during the budget process to determine whether they’re needed, meet their goals, are cost-effective and are worth what they cost: a projected $35.8 billion in fiscal 2009, well above the year’s tax revenue of $25.1 billion as estimated by the Treasury Department. Thus its call to modernize the state’s tax structure instead of more rounds of politically motivated tax cuts.

Michael Boulus, executive director of the Presidents Council, describes the coalition as “a robust group of organizations with one thing in common: we’re all reliant on tax revenue for our survival.” The shared goal, the “bond that brings us together,” is finding a predictable and stable mix of taxes to support public services.

Boulus describes Parks and the League as “the catalyst to keep the whole thing moving together” as coalition members try to influence legislative tax decisions — and if legislative efforts fail, discussion of a potential future ballot issue on tax restructuring.

Says Parks, “I can’t think of another place that deals in depth with the issues I care about” and provides the opportunity to work with people from “policymakers to church folks to labor folks to academicians.”

Eric Freedman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is associate professor of Journalism and director of Capital News Service at Michigan State University. He and Dome columnist Stephen A. Jones are co-editors of African Americans in Congress: A Documentary History (Congressional Quarterly Press).