Ann Meitzen is a Regional Supervisor for the Regional Office of a Not for Profit Case management agency entitled CT Community Care, Inc and has been at this agency for over 20 years.

She works with some 7000 participants in the CT Home Care Program, including frail elderly people, a small number of younger consumers with neurological diseases and clients of the Money Follows Persons project who are able to return to the community from nursing home placements of six months or longer.

Her job entails supervising the clinical staff of the regional office who manage about 1,400 clients at any particular time and ensuring that the operations of the regional office are both coordinated, are contract compliant and are clinically appropriate.

Quality assurance, teaching, problem solving, customer service, troubleshooting, mentoring and modeling good communication styles are only a few of the things she does each day.

Previously Meitzen was a VISTA volunteer after college and worked from 1973 to 1974 at Riker’s Island Prison with juvenile detainees. From 1974 to 1981 she worked as a teacher at an alternative school (combining social work and education), and from 1981 to 1985 she worked for the state at an institution for emotionally disturbed adolescents and at the regional office level.

She has also worked at Highland Heights doing special needs adoptions and as a therapist in a pre-school program. She experienced field placements in adult substance abuse and in-patient adult psychiatric treatment settings.

Since 1990 she has worked as a care manager for Connecticut Community Care Inc. and later worked as a trainer in CCCI’s educational services department. She taught, from from 1998-2006 at Quinnipiac University.  In 1999 she came to the eastern Connecticut regional office of CCCI as a regional manager and is now clinical supervisor for the region.

She was moved by Michael Harrington’s book, “The Other America,” a landmark 1962 study of poverty in America that spurred the government’s “War on Poverty.” The book convinced Meitzen to become a social worker.

The most gratifying part of her profession, she says, is “watching people grow and develop.  My job has been to assist others, consumers and staff alike, in finding the tools they need to become fulfilled and productive.  This has been the most gratifying and satisfying part of this profession for me”.