November 21, 2009
Volunteer’s love of helping people has been a lifelong quest
By Denise MacLachlan
Herald staff
Irma
Michel, a member of Good Shepherd Parish in Elk Grove, was recently honored
for her community work and volunteerism. “I love helping people,”
she told The Herald. Luis Gris/Herald photo
While vacationing with her family when she was eight years old at her grandmother’s
house in Mexico, Irma Michel answered a knock at the door one morning to
find a very dirty little girl, younger and smaller than herself, asking
for food.
Michel called her grandmother, who greeted the little girl warmly, then
turned to Michel, asking, “Is this your sister?”
When Michel indignantly denied any relationship to someone so poor and dirty,
her grandmother gently explained that the girl standing in the doorway with
them was indeed Michel’s sister, and that all children were Michel’s
sisters and brothers.
Decades later, Michel explains that her grandmother’s teaching has
stayed with her all of her life.
“I love helping people,” she said. “They are all my sisters
and brothers.”
Formerly a deputy director with California State Managed Risk Medical Insurance
Board (MR.MIB), now retired and a catechist and eucharistic minister at
Good Shepherd Parish in Elk Grove, Michel was recently honored for her community
work and volunteerism by Wells Fargo Bank and KVIE Public Television in
the station’s fourth annual “Latino Culture Celebration.”
She’s been involved in prison ministry at Cosumnes Correctional Facility
and mentored pregnant teens at a local Baptist church. She’s traveled
many times with the Flying Samaritans to provide translation and other support
services in a temporary agricultural clinic in Mexico.
She translates between Spanish and English for senior citizens applying
for disability or sorting through the bewildering paperwork of threatened
foreclosure on their homes. She’s been known to wait patiently in
line on behalf of a senior at social services offices to get questions answered.
“I have the heart of a social worker,” Michel said.
Michel traces her career in helping people back to her childhood in Lincoln,
where she began translating for her parents at the bank or in the doctor’s
office when she was six years old. Her parents were Mexican immigrants who
met in the United States in the 1950s, she said.
”My father was a bracero,” Michel explained, “one of the
agricultural workers invited by the U.S. government to work on American
farms during World War II.” Her father came to the U.S. in 1944 and
worked all over the country before settling down in Lincoln.
Michel liked translating for her parents, she said, and being part of the
adult world and learning about various adult systems, like banking and health
care. But as a child, she never saw how these experiences could apply to
her life as an adult.
Then in 1972, just after she graduated from high school and married, Michel
met her mentor: Fred Hall, a social worker with a passion to establish a
series of federally-funded primary health care clinics for farmworkers living
in the migrant worker camps in the Central Valley.
“It was Fred’s dream,” Michel said, “and there were
only two of us, but we made it happen.”
She and Hall researched federal funding possibilities and met with city
councils and county supervisors, eventually establishing Regional Rural
Health Programs, Inc., with clinics in Woodland, Madison, Dixon, Courtland
and Walnut Grove.
In the process, Michel had discovered the world of public policy, and her
place in it: translating legislated policies into action for real people.
“I saw the overall picture and how many people would benefit from
my hard work,” she said, “and that was worth all the work.”
Michel left the clinics to stay home with her first baby, her son Robert,
born in 1976. She went back to work eventually as a clerk at a state agency.
Then in 1992, she had the opportunity to work in public policy again, this
time with the state of California’s Managed Risk Medical Insurance
Board (MR.MIB), which was implementing a new program: Access to Infants
and Mothers (AIM).
“Getting services to pregnant women and children? How could I not
do it?” Michel asked, laughing.
In 1997, Michel was appointed deputy director at MR.MIB, which oversees
AIM, and helped to implement not only AIM but also the Healthy Families
Program when it was created. She traveled extensively throughout the state
to increase public awareness of the programs and to check in on the services
as they are provided on the ground.
”I was able to make sure that public policy actually provides real
services to low-income, working people,” Michel said.
Michel retired only five years ago, to spend time with her daughter Elisa,
currently a student at California State University, Fresno. Her son Robert
is a chef in Elk Grove. Michel’s husband, Al, a retired state auditor,
has his own accounting business and is a member of the Knights of Columbus.
In retirement, Michel continues to help people, just as her grandmother
taught her.
At Good Shepherd Parish, she chairs the yearly festival activities, helps
with parish accounting, takes the Eucharist to the homebound, and helps
with catechists, according to her pastor, Father Alfredo Tamayo.
Sister Maria Concepcion Cambaya, a member of the Religious of the Blessed
Virgin Mary and director of religious education at the parish, praises in
particular Michel’s work as a catechist.
“Irma is committed, prepared and fantastic,” Sister Cambaya
said. When Michel headed off to the annual Religious Education Congress
in Anaheim last spring, Sister Cambaya asked her to “echo” what
she learned when she returned for the other parish catechists.
Michel’s presentation was so inspiring that Sister Cambaya made her
one of the speakers on the parish catechist formation team, she said. Besides
her formidable preparation before presenting (Michel thoroughly researched
her material in the library, Sister Cambaya noted, then reorganized the
library itself so that other catechists might make better use of it), Michel
puts so much joy into her teaching that others are delighted to learn.
“She sings and dances when she teaches and she gets everyone else
to sing and dance, too,” Sister Cambaya said.
The ebullient Michel also continues to help influence public policy, now
as a consultant.
Working with a group of consultants, she recently arranged a tour of programs
in action for state legislative staffers. She wanted them to see how families
actually get care, she said.
Michel brought the staffers to an elementary school with a Healthy Start
program, to show them how that program works in practice. She wanted them
to see how families in need find clothing, food, health care and dental
work for their children, she said. Then she took the staffers to the county
clinic in Sacramento that had closed for lack of funding and then been reopened.
She introduced them to mothers looking for care for their children. The
women told the legislative staffers their stories.
“I wanted the staffers to see that there are consequences to legislators’
decisions,” Michel said.
All these years later, Michel is still translating.
