As her great-grandmother was on her deathbed Meagan Sims reassured her beloved mentor and role model that she would remain strong and finish school. It’s what the older woman wanted for her young charge.
Sims, now 36, took that promise and ran with it. She’s now working on her doctorate in Education degree at Governor State University, among other achievements, and she credits her great-grandmother, Nan Eva Sims, with paving the way for her success.
“I always try to honor my great-grandmother because she gave me so much and taught me so much,” said Sims, who lives in Richton Park with her 3-year-old daughter, Joi. “She was very nurturing, loving, supportive and always wanted the best for me.
“And she was a strong advocate for education.”
In addition to her doctoral work in Interdisciplinary Leadership, she has worked as a child welfare specialist for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services since July. There she fields calls for the Child Abuse and Neglect Hotline, processing reports on abuse and neglect that come in from families, teachers and police, referring some callers for crisis counseling and other mental health services.
It’s important work, but the job that resonates most with her has been managing a youth in care program for 8- to 20-year-olds at Aunt Martha’s, a community resource agency based in Olympia Fields.
“I love those kids,” Sims said. “Even though they experienced an extensive amount of trauma, they were so resilient.
“They gave me a nickname, ‘Mama Meagan,’” she fondly recalled.
Her association with Aunt Martha’s stretches back to her own youth, when her parents were struggling with substance abuse. Sims was in “kinship care” and then adopted by her grandmother at age 11, along with her sister, then 10. Regular involvement by DCFS and Aunt Martha’s left a positive impression.
“The case workers came to our house to check on us, take us to McDonald’s and Chuck E. Cheese’s,” Sims said. “Every year there was a Christmas party for families with a big Christmas tree, and we could pick whatever present we wanted. I have good memories from Aunt Martha’s.”
Years later, her job at Aunt Martha’s offered an eye-opening experience about the rigors of social work. She cited a supervisor there whose stress level, she believed, led to his early death. As a tribute to him, her doctoral dissertation focuses on burnout among child welfare workers in Illinois.
Sims’ great-grandmother died when she was 15, and she and her sister were adopted by their grandmother, Mary Gardner, who also had a role in her success.
“She was tough but fair … she treated me like she treated her own kids,” Sims said. “I always tell her, ‘Grandma, now you can come over to my house, eat my food and watch my TV, like I did at yours.’”
But her teenage years involved more than eating and watching the tube. She worked at White Castle while she was a student at Englewood High School, eventually becoming a manager. She was also in the JROTC program and upon graduation, joined the Army.
At GSU, Sims helped get the ACE (Youth in Transition—Achieving Completion with Excellence) program off to a start in 2022.
That program helps youth who, like her, have been in alternative, foster, kinship, adoption or residential care by providing them access to with peer advocates through a partnership with YMCA Community Action Programs.
It’s just one of the ways she’s making an impact at the university.
“I think that whenever you’re doing interviews for a doctoral program, one thing students can’t do is they can’t fake passion,” said Matthew Cooney, her adviser and associate professor of Education and director of the Interdisciplinary Leadership Doctoral Program in the College of Education and Human Development at GSU.
“I think that’s one thing that really stood out was her passion, her ‘why’ behind a doctoral degree, it really was like ‘I want to give back to the community and that’s one way I could do this.’”
Cooney said he thought Sims’ experience in kinship care and the military indirectly pushed her to do more.
“I think that grit and perseverance are probably higher for her based on life experience,” he said.
Janice Neumann is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.