Sandra (Sandy) Kay Downs, age 79, was born on August 26, 1944, and grew up in Delphi, Indiana, where she lived until moving to Lafayette and attending Purdue University. After graduation, when asked where she lived, Sandy said, "The world is my address." And Sandy aimed to make that so. She lived in Delphi, Lafayette, Ouagadougou, El Paso, Colorado Springs, Cleveland, New York City, Baltimore, and Chicago, where she trained at the School of Social Work at the University of Chicago. In all of these cities, she worked with poor women and children. Women, poorly educated and disenfranchised, many of them battered; kids living in bad foster homes, kids who were tossed into institutional care and warehoused, and kids whose families abused them. Sandy was their advocate, their grit and strength in the courts, the shelters, the hospitals, the welfare departments, and the police barracks when they were too beaten down to help themselves.
While uplifting and perhaps inspiring in the telling, these stories of survival led Sandy to disdain Social Work's primary focus on individual "troubles." She became passionate in her belief that America's systems and institutions comprise a crumbling, failing safety net. And too often, these systems harm those who engage with them by necessity or chance.
At the end of Sandy's career, she turned to activism and system advocacy. She was asked to evaluate a now notorious program in Maine where she found children who were humiliated, abused, forced to box one another, and even tracked if they attempted to escape. Sandy reported and publicized her findings, ultimately closing the program. Sandy was then hired as a consultant to make recommendations in a child custody dispute between an administrator of a State agency and a mother who had recently divorced the administrator's son. After months of conflict, court hearings, and chaos, Sandy recommended that the children be returned to their mother. The judge agreed. The administrator resigned when confronted with allegations that he had used his position in an attempt to influence the court.
Sadly, Sandy's beliefs about the need for system change were reaffirmed in her final months of life. After suffering a stroke last December, she languished in an emergency room for an entire day before being transported to a stroke specialty hospital. After treatment, she was moved to a nursing home but left unattended and fell from a wheelchair, bursting her head open. Subsequent hospitalizations led to pressure wounds. A second nursing home refused to provide therapy, deeming her too weak, and her long-term doctor refused to continue to treat her. Sandy succumbed to a stroke, the perils of an ill-equipped medical system, and the vicissitudes of professional medical opinions.
Sandy was an avid (and sometimes rabid) advocate. But she was also a pool shark, an over-the-road driver, and a wanna-be interior decorator. She was funny with a wry sense of humor. She called her caretakers' twisted sisters. Sandy loved life, her dog Wiggins, arts and crafts (her home is an art gallery), old houses, old furniture, flowers, gardens, trees, the ocean, and all things beautiful.
Sandy loved her family and is lovingly remembered by her son, Zachary Lang, and her cousins, Joan (Hans Groot) Ferrier, Knoxville, Tennessee, and Robert (Pam), Ferrier, Clarksville, Tennessee. Julie (Doug), Patrick, Trystan (Brittany), Patrick, Sarah Patrick, all of Round Rock, Texas, and her decades-long friend, Carole Alexander, Baltimore, Maryland.
Sandy was devoted to her dogs. Should you wish to make a remembrance in her honor, please make a gift to the Almost Home Animal Shelter Building Fund in Lafayette, Indiana.
