This year’s News Service of Florida Above & Beyond Award awardees include Carrie Baird, CEO of Flagler Cares. According to NSF, the awards recognize Florida’s most powerful and thought-provoking women who have made major contributions to society and shown excellent leadership in their respective fields.
According to Baird, Flagler Cares, a non-profit organization located on the Palm Coast that recently celebrated its tenth year, uses a “no-wrong-door” approach to problem-solving to connect people to resources, benefits, or direct services. At City Marketplace, it serves as the umbrella organization for the Flagler County Village, which unites seven service organizations. The Palm Coast Citizen of the Year for 2024 was Baird.
Baird was nominated in June by Barbara Revels, a former county commissioner and co-founder of Flagler Cares and a member of the Board.According to Revels, Carrie Baird’s statewide recognition for her efforts in Flagler and Volusia Counties is truly an honor. She is the epitome of professionalism, possessing extensive knowledge and connections. She excels at recognizing community needs and determining which public and private entities to approach for cooperation. Flagler Cares is quite proud of this award, which highlights her effort that goes above and beyond.
Over the years, a lot has been written about Flagler Cares. Apart from a few hazy sketches, very little has been written about Baird up to this point.
Born in Virginia and raised on a cattle farm in Remington, southwest of Manassas, Baird had attended James Madison University, where she majored in sociology and English with a focus on criminology. She remarked, “I’ve always liked the idea of societal impacts on the individual, including serial killers.”
When she began volunteering at a halfway house, she had no idea where it would lead her. She was quickly employed as an employee, and by the time she was a senior in college, she was in charge of the organization. She was establishing a trend that would recur in later years and phases of her professional journey: Baird isn’t a big follower.
She felt it was time for a change of pace when the CEO of the company she worked for was killed by a resident of a halfway house. After moving to St. Augustine without a job to live with a friend, she worked in a few restaurants before she was hired by Jan Abee, the state’s sole female juvenile justice manager at the time, at the Department of Juvenile Justice.
According to a document from the state Justice Research Center, Abee led the Department’s efforts to create and put into place a statewide system of evaluating the needs and criminogenic risks of Florida’s juvenile offenders. She became a mentor to Baird. She gave me permission to do a lot of things that were well above my pay grade. According to Baird, I was a member of the management group. I handled a federally sponsored special project that turned into One Voice for Volusia, and I gained knowledge of the entire system as part of that. (If Abee hadn’t moved to Ohio to retire, she would have likely been a lock to win the Above & Beyond Award, just like Baird.)
Flagler Cares begins with a single voice. After Governor Lawton Chiles was replaced by Jeb Bush and juvenile justice became increasingly boot-camp-minded and bureaucratic, Baird founded the non-profit with colleagues from the Department of Juvenile Justice.
As if explaining Flagler Cares, Baird stated, “The relationship with DJJ persisted for a while, but One Voice developed into its own, bringing various organizations around the table to collaborate and coordinate and create a system of care.” That seems to have been ingrained in my DNA from the start. the notion of attempting to bring a disjointed system together. There will always be competition and disagreements, but you can still be in alignment and have a common objective, and everyone can assist you reach it in their own unique way and within their own sphere of influence.
Baird was the executive director at One Voice for 13 years. In the meanwhile, Flagler Cares began a family, relocated to Orlando (she has a 14-year-old boy and an 11-year-old daughter), continued to advise for One Voice, and then, after some time as a stay-at-home mother, was prepared to return to work and return to Ormond Beach.
As the administrator of Flagler County’s Health Department at the time, she had known Patrick Johnson, who introduced her to Dr. Stephen Bickel, the department’s medical director who was creating Flagler Cares with Revels, Johnson, and Ken Mattison, who was then the CEO of what was Florida Hospital Flagler (now AdventHealth Palm Coast). “They couldn’t get rid of me after they hired me as a consultant to do some strategic planning and facilitation,” Baird said.
According to its recently released annual report, Flagler Cares provided $221,000 in direct assistance (from utilities to rent to medical emergencies or even, in one case, a water heater) and less directly measurable services like counseling, benefit assistance and navigation (try securing disability or SNAP without help), and other services to 2,304 people in the previous year (the number would be much higher if households are measured). (Check out the yearly report here.)
Baird stated, “I’ve been doing this for 25 years.” Everything I’ve ever grumbled about and everything you always want someone would do seems to be reflected in what we’re doing here in Flagler. I believe we’re succeeding. Because I can definitely be direct and point out issues, and we are now working to address them head-on. We didn’t offer direct services with One Voice for Volusia in the past since we didn’t want to compete with our membership, which consists of all direct-service agencies. A completely different strategy for attempting to change things is to offer direct customer services.
As Baird was getting ready to do what she does every month, which is to give a 60-minute overview presentation about Flagler Cares and a tour of the 10,000-square-foot Village with a staffer, the interview had to end because it had already gone far beyond its allotted time. This time, the group included County Commissioner Leann Pennington, developer Jeff Douglas, and Maryiotti Johnson and Madison Asbill from the Flagler Education Foundation. Additionally, the overview took much longer than anticipated. As synapses shot around the table, it evolved into a group-wide session on social services, the local economy, and how the other half navigates it all. Baird was in his prime.
When questioned about it, she admitted that she was taken aback to hear about the Above and Beyond Award. She said, “I thought maybe it was just spam.” I’ve been researching it ever since, and I’ve come across some truly remarkable individuals. Thus, I’m not sure. anxious. I’m flattered.
Florida Supreme Court Justice Jamie Grosshans and Senate President Kathleen Passidomo were the featured speakers at the Above and Beyond gala held at the Doubletree Hotel in Tallahassee last year (the same location as this year’s event on October 8). In a bit of a leveling, this year s keynote speaker is Rep. Allisan Tant, the House s minority deputy whip and a Panhandle Democrat. The winners from the previous year were Lindsey Zander, executive director of the Florida Education Foundation; Beth Kigel, chair of the board of trustees at Florida Polytechnic University; Merritt Martin, chief of staff at the Moffitt Cancer Center; and Lauren Book, founder and CEO of Lauren’s Kids and minority leader in the Florida Senate. Among the previous year’s winners is Barbara Petersen, the executive director of the Florida Center for Government Accountability and former president of the First Amendment Foundation.
The Florida News Serviceis a Tallahassee-based, statewide news outlet that offers subscription services and covers public affairs, courts, and state politics. (A subscription is FlaglerLive.)
