Setting high standards and attention to detail
By Rick Padden, American Red Cross Public Affairs
Name: Karen McClure
Location: Fort Collins
GAP: DAT, DDO, Case Worker/Case Worker Supervisor, ERV Driver
Length of service: 3 years
Deployments: 0
American Red Cross volunteer Karen McClure is a stickler for details, and setting high standards has been a major part of her professional life. While she’s trained in multiple areas of disaster response, casework and caseworker supervision are her specialties, and her years of attention to critical details prepared her well for being that person who follows up on the follow-uppers.
McClure spent most of her career at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX, doing work that left no room for error. “After working in the laboratory there,” she said, “I transitioned to the education side and taught people in the bachelorette program how to work in the laboratory.”
She retired from the university in 2009 after 30 years of work, but unretired soon after, “Like the next day,” she said, taking her training to another level – and to other countries. She worked another eight years through the Clinical Lab & Standards Institute (CLSI) and under President G.W. Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in Africa (followed by President Obama). “Quality control was an area of mine,” she said, “and when I volunteered initially with CLSI, they sent me to Namibia and Tanzania. I liked it, and they gave me a job.” McClure ran a team of seven lab specialists helping other countries improve their medical laboratory operations.
It was helping others that eventually led her to the Red Cross. “I really enjoyed working with CLSI, and giving back to individuals who needed something, or didn’t have knowledge that I had,” she said. “I used all my expertise working in a cancer hospital and the laboratory, and transferred it to individuals who didn’t know how to do that.
“I joined the Red Cross because I like helping people who need help, and find it extremely rewarding that I can give something of myself.” She’s trained for disaster response, is a disaster duty officer, caseworker and supervisor and is even ready to hit the road as an ERV driver, but follow up work is her passion – making sure progress is being made toward recovery. She’s on call most weekends, usually working with northern Colorado fire disasters.
“I spend most of my time looking at cases in this region,” she said. “I review them and make sure things are getting done and I can close them out. “On the duty officer side you’re calling people to respond to a disaster, but on the casework side you get to see the close of a case, which is good.”
One particularly disturbing case unfortunately was linked to arson. “It involved a couple my age,” she said, “whose son and 8-year-old daughter were living with them. The son had set fire to the home.” While the family survived without injury, McClure said, “It was incredibly sad to me to see that this happened coming into the holidays. It broke my heart.”
She was the DDO on that call, so couldn’t do the casework, but noted that Red Cross assistance was still available to the family. “It was still a disaster for them, and the cause wasn’t so much the issue as getting them help.”
“When someone has lost everything – their house has burned all the way down to the ground and they just have the clothes on their back – that’s hard. You want to help them get everything really fast so they can recuperate.” She said that full recovery isn’t always fast, and depends on insurance and sometimes the size of the community and resources available, but that the Red Cross response is immediate, no matter the time of day.
“I think the key to working with the Red Cross is being flexible,” she said. “If you can’t deal with things changing on the fly, this may not be the organization for you.” And while McClure hasn’t deployed yet, she expects to, and her husband of 25 years, David, is ready too. “He can take care of the dog while I’m gone,” she said.