Maybe it would be different if they were selling cars or bidding on building projects, but having a mostly female staff seems to suit The Arc.

“It’s not a sales competition,” says Jacki Neil Boss, The Arc’s executive director for the past six years. “We’re working to improve people’s lives.”

AMY J. CORRENTI | ROCKFORDWOMAN.COM
Jacki Neil Boss is th executive director of the ARC of Winnebago, Boone and Ogle Counties.

The nonprofit corporation, founded in 1966, serves 200 to 300 people with disabilities each month. Seven of its eight employees are women, but not by design.

“I would never think of gender as a hiring requisite,” she says. “It’s personality. You have to be able to work in a collaborative way.”

Women tend to outnumber men in human services, Neil Boss says. Nursing, social work and elementary school teaching are primarily staffed by women. But even in other fields, trends in management favor styles that women are traditionally good at: working collaboratively, being flexible, valuing teamwork, creating less of a hierarchy and more of a collaboration of colleagues.

When hiring, she looks at aptitude and interests, not just education and experience. Motherhood has helped prepare some of her co-workers for the challenging job they face, she says. At The Arc, employees help families raising a disabled child and help people with disabilities live independently.

“Women will do anything for their children, so they learn to do anything with what they’ve got,” she says. “They find a way.”
Her clients are emancipated at age 18 and have the right to enter agreements and refuse medical help. But if they can’t make informed decisions, the state can step in to offer a limited guardianship. The Arc doesn’t make that decision; it works with other agencies and the Department of Human Services.

“Knowing what to do in the best interest of someone can be very difficult. They’re very vulnerable individuals. They need to be treated as adults, but they also need to be protected as well.”

She cites one young man with developmental disabilities whose parents died, leaving him the house. He had a job, a good work ethic and was able to do well, until his car stopped working. A seller talked him into buying a new one he couldn’t afford — the car payment equaled his monthly salary. Soon he was living with no water and no electricity.

The Arc was able to help him sell the car, buy an affordable one, sell the house and buy a small condo. Again he did well, until he decided to sell his condo to get more money. He didn’t understand that he would have to move out.

Arc employees discovered the situation three days before the closing and scrambled to find a lawyer. While one employee attended the closing, another was arranging for a mover in case the sale went through.

“We were able to prove that he was not signing a document he understood,” she says, and the sale was canceled.

Such situations require a variety of skills, including empathy and intuition. An employee might ask, “How would I feel if this were my son?”

Neil Boss draws on personal experience. After attending the University of Capetown in South Africa, she and her husband began raising a family there. They moved back because their older son has disabilities and needed surgery and social support. Alex, 39, lives at Milestone, which provides group housing for adults with disabilities.

Neil Boss came to The Arc in 1996 as a family support advocate. As executive director, she oversees a small, stable work force that features a mix of generations. “We are like family,” she says. “I think we can learn from each other.”

One of the lessons they struggle with is developing positive assertiveness: “There are times when you’re not helping someone by being nice to them.”

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