A Mind of Her Own

From the time she was a little girl, Nancy Tolbert was known for having a mind of her own, and she put it to understanding the world around her. If girls couldn’t do all the things boys could do, she wanted to know why. If a teacher told her to do something that didn’t make sense, she wanted to know the logic. With independent stubbornness, she demanded that the world around her adhere to laws of reason and justice. If a rule didn’t resonate with her sense of how a fair society should be, it deserved to be challenged.

Growing up in an ethnic neighborhood in upstate New York where everyone knew everyone, it didn’t take long for Nancy to notice that disabled individuals in her community were treated differently. “I can still remember one little girl who wasn’t allowed to go to school, just because she was disabled,” she recalls. “It was the same situation for another young man who lived down the street from us. He just roamed the streets all day—it was no way to teach him how to get on in the world. I wanted to know why these injustices were happening, but no one could tell me.”

These unanswered questions never left her, and returned to the forefront of her thoughts when she defied the expectations of everyone around her by becoming the first of her family to graduate college. There, she met a particularly passionate professor who ignited her interest in disability justice. Now the Executive Director of CALMRA, Inc., Nancy continues to redefine what it means to have a disability in society today, providing the solace of support and the power of possibility to families as committed to change as she is.

CALMRA was first conceived of by Mary Solko, a Maryland resident who began to wonder what would happen to her developmentally disabled daughter when she could no longer care for her. Meeting the fear head-on, she built a coalition of people facing similar challenges. Over the course of several years, they met in the basement of the First United Methodist Church for brownies, coffee, and conversation. They envisioned lives for their loved ones that far surpassed the conditions of institutional living—lives where their disabled children, siblings, or other family members could live in a home-like setting and feel meaningful fulfillment.

At the time, Nancy was working for the state of Maryland, supervising a federally mandated program and providing case management to people living in the community with disabilities. She began working with Mary’s daughter, getting to know Mary in the process. Though the coalition had originally wanted to bypass state funding, Nancy’s input opened their minds to the stability it would lend, and after five years of deliberation, they resolved that they were ready to launch, and that Nancy should be their Executive Director.

At first, she resisted. “It’s an extremely demanding role in an equally challenging industry,” she remarks. “You’re providing service everyday, all the time. When your budget gets cut, you can’t cut back on staff or food. You have to figure something else out. At first, I wasn’t sure I wanted to take on that responsibility.”

It was Nancy’s brother who ultimately changed her mind, pointing out that she could do her current job in her sleep. She had learned all she could in that capacity, and unless she pressed forward, she’d stagnate. “I realized he was right,” she concedes. “I also realized I had seen the residential and support services available to the disabled in our community, and I knew I could do a better job.” With that, Nancy accepted the position, and on July 27th, 1992, CALMRA opened for business.

In the beginning, the organization had no money and a shoestring budget, but it did have a goal: to help families who could no longer care for their children with cognitive disabilities in their home. It started as a program of the Arc of Prince George’s County, and in her closet-sized office, equipped with only a folding table, chair, and phone, Nancy began building the organization. The Great Oaks Center, the institution serving the Southern region of Maryland, had recently closed down, so CALMRA began taking on its former clients. By October, it had opened two houses in residential communities, serving three people per house.

Today, CALMRA has around a hundred employees, including administrative staff and trained caregivers. Each of its sixteen homes across Prince George’s and Montgomery County is staffed with a live-in employee, which makes them feel even more like home. “It can be very hard at first for families to transition their child into one of our houses,” Nancy explains. “They know that person better than anyone, and they worry we won’t take care of them as well. But we’ve seen some incredible and transformative success for our residents, and our philosophy is to incorporate the families as much as possible in their son or daughter’s life, maintaining that contact. Our progressive, three-person setup provides an environment where individuals can create a life that’s meaningful to them. It’s not a place to get services; it’s their home.”

CALMRA has also opened a support service program to assist families who are able to keep their disabled children at home but need some extra help. Then, in 2010, they opened a senior center for individuals with disabilities, the Mary Solko Center. Inspired by CALMRA clients who were aging but not yet ready to retire, the center now serves thirty people, with plans to expand. Taken together, the various components of CALMRA operate on a budget of $6 million, with fundraisers modestly supplementing the state funding they rely on, and only seven percent of that spent on administrative costs. The organization completed a rigorous voluntary certification program to earn the Maryland Association of Nonprofit Organizations Seal of Excellence—a testament to its commitment to integrity, value, and impact.

This commitment has been a hallmark of Nancy’s character from the time she was a little girl, chasing after her four older brothers because she wanted to go to school like them. When she finally got to Kindergarten, she couldn’t understand why all the other children cried when their parents left. “I was so excited that we had finally made it to school, and I was shocked that the other kids weren’t as thrilled as I was,” she laughs.

Growing up in Syracuse, Nancy’s mother worked as a cook in her uncle’s restaurant after her father left, and then got a job cleaning safes. They lived in a flat above her grandparents’ house, and when her older brothers went to school, Nancy would play checkers and do puzzles with her beloved great grandmother who lived with her grandparents. When her great grandmother passed away and she was told she had suddenly gone to Heaven, little Nancy wasn’t satisfied. “I kept asking, what does that mean? How does that work?” she says. “In the wake of that experience, understanding the world became particularly important to me.”

When Nancy was in seventh grade, her mother remarried, adding five stepsiblings to the mix. “It was hard to blend the families at first, and I was very headstrong, which didn’t make it easier,” she recalls. “But it got better with time.”

Nancy attended Catholic school until, one day toward the end of her freshman year of high school, she showed up to a classroom to find there weren’t enough seats. The school was run on a modular schedule, and she could easily have gone to another classroom for the period, but the nun told her she had to sit on the floor. When she protested, she was given detention, so the next year, she signed herself up for public school. “When my mom found out, she was furious, but I knew I needed a different environment,” she says. “Not only was it more fair, but we got to wear regular clothes instead of uniforms. We had a winning football team, a golf course, a swimming pool, and an ice rink.”

Nancy excelled at her new school and worked on the side, trading in her paper route and babysitting gigs for jobs at AMES, Olan Mills, and a local department store. She worked for the VA one summer, and at an ice cream factory the next. “I’ve never not worked,” she says. She became editor of the yearbook her senior year—a leadership role that aligned with her understated, independent character. “I’m not really one for the limelight,” she remarks today. “I like to get things done in my own way.”

That meant one day getting out of Syracuse, and Nancy knew college was her best ticket, so she took charge of her life and made it happen. She put herself through the College at Brockport, a State University of New York. After exploring her options through her first couple years, she decided to major in social work. It fit well with her innate interests, which included volunteering on Thursday evenings with individuals with disabilities, learning sign language, and planning a Disability Awareness Week to highlight how inaccessible the campus was. Aside from the passion inspired by her professor for disability justice, she chose the profession because she knew she’d be readily employable when she finished her studies.

Upon graduating Suma Cum Laude, Nancy returned home for the first time since leaving. She spent a summer working her old job at the ice cream factory and was reminded how hard day-in, day-out, dead-end work is. Her brother was living in Maryland at the time and had a spare room in his townhouse, so she decided to move down and got a job as a counselor at a group home. She enrolled in graduate school at Catholic University, and for one intense year, she was working full time, taking classes full time, and participating in an internship for twenty hours each week. She was promoted to a supervisor role at work, and when the organization opened a group home down the street from the university, she pressed them to let her be a live-in supervisor. “I was there to help out the staff when they needed it, and it made for a much more stable home,” she recalls. “It created a sense of ownership and accountability that was really meaningful, and that’s what CALMRA is modeled after today.”

When Nancy earned her masters degree, she became the social worker for the organization she was working for. The federal waiver program had just been launched, and they needed someone to do resource coordination. Before long, she was promoted to supervisor. Later, she was hired by the state to develop the deaf unit at their mental hospital, ensuring that the appropriate services were put in place. She then went on to work for Montgomery County doing child abuse investigations. During that time, she married Fred Tolbert, a friend of her brother’s and the first native of the area she had met. “He’s incredibly supportive,” she remarks. “If I come home talking about an injustice, he gets angrier about it than I do.”

Now, as a leader at CALMRA, Nancy tries to give her employees what she expects from others. People are free to do their jobs as they see fit, and nothing goes on in the organization without input from all levels. “I have an open door policy, and anyone can come talk to me about anything,” she remarks. “We strive for transparency, and I try to make sure our mission is clear so that every staff member knows what we’re about and how they fit into the overall mission.” This leadership style has garnered incredible loyalty amongst staff, with some employees staying on for over two decades in an industry that generally sees high turnover. “Above all else, the people we serve come first,” she affirms. “Their health and safety is our top priority at all times.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Nancy emphasizes the importance of ethics and focus. “Don’t lose sight of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, and always make ethical decisions,” she says, echoing the Catholic upbringing that underpins her every action, word, and decision. Beyond that, her life path is a testament to the difference that hard work and a mission-driven mind can make. “There’s no money to be made in this work, but that’s not why I do it,” she says. “It’s about the meaning. That’s why I would tell any young person that the key to success is having passion for whatever you do, whether it’s for profit or not for profit. If you don’t love it, why do it? I feel so lucky that I’ve found something I love to do.” She may have a mind of her own, but Nancy’s mission is expansive, and CALMRA is the perfect vehicle to bring it to life.

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