Carrie Baird, chief executive officer of Flagler Cares, is among this year’s honorees of the News Service of Florida Above & Beyond Award. In NSF’s words, the awards honor the “most influential and thought-provoking women in Florida who have demonstrated exemplary leadership in their field, combined with having made significant contributions to society.”
Flagler Cares, a Palm Coast-based non-profit that just marked its 10th anniversary, connects people to benefits, direct services or resources through a “no-wrong-door” approach to solving problems, as Baird puts it. It is the umbrella organization of the Flagler County Village, which gathers seven service organizations under one roof at City Marketplace. Baird was the 2024 Palm Coast Citizen of the Year.
Flagler Cares co-founder and Board member Barbara Revels, the former county commissioner, nominated Baird in June. “It is such an honor for Carrie Baird to receive this statewide recognition for her work in Flagler and Volusia Counties,” Revels said. “She is the ultimate professional with wide-reaching knowledge and contacts. She is excellent at identifying the needs in a community and knowing where to seek collaboration through public and private organizations Flagler Cares couldn’t be prouder for this award, showcasing her ‘Above and Beyond’ work.”
Much has been written about Flagler Cares over the years. Until now, almost nothing has been written about Baird beyond a few blurby sketches.
A native of Virginia who grew up on a cattle farm in Remington, southwest of Manassas, Baird had studied English and sociology, with an emphasis on criminology, when she attended James Madison University. “I just always liked the idea of societal impacts on the individual,” serial killers included, she said.
She wasn’t sure where that would take her when she started volunteering at a halfway house, was soon hired as an employee, and by the time she was a senior in college, was running the place. She was setting a pattern that would repeat in subsequent years and steps along her career path: Baird isn’t much of a follower.
When the head of the company she worked for was murdered by a halfway house resident, she thought it was time for a change of pace. She had a friend in St. Augustine, moved there without a job and worked in a couple of restaurants before landing at the Department of Juvenile Justice, where she worked for Jan Abee, the only female juvenile justice manager in the state at the time.
Abee, according to a state Justice Research Center document, “spearheaded the Department’s efforts to develop and implement a statewide system of assessing the criminogenic risks and needs of juvenile offenders in Florida.” She became Baird’s mentor. “She allowed me to do all kinds of things that were way beyond my pay grade. I was part of the management team,” Baird says. “I learned the whole system being part of that, and I managed a federally funded special project that became One Voice for Volusia.” (Like Baird, Abee would have probably been a shoe-in for the Above & Beyond Award had she not retired to Ohio.)
One voice is a precursor to Flagler Cares. Baird started the non-profit with colleagues from the Department of Juvenile Justice after Gov. Lawton Chiles gave way to Jeb Bush and juvenile justice became more stiflingly bureaucratic and boot-camp minded.
The connection with DJJ continued for a while, but One Voice grew into its own, “bringing different organizations around the table to collaborate and coordinate and create a system of care,” Baird said, as if describing Flagler Cares. “I think that’s been kind of in my DNA from the very beginning. The idea of trying to unite a fragmented system. And not everybody’s going to agree, and there’s always going to be competition, but you can be in alignment, and you can have a shared goal, and everybody helps you get there in their own way, within their own sphere of influence.”
Baird was the executive director at One Voice for 13 years. There was an interregnum between that and Flagler Cares, when she started a family, moved to Orlando (she has a 14-year-old son, an 11-year-old daughter), kept consulting for One Voice, then after spending a while as a stay-at-home mom, was ready to go back to work, and back to Ormond Beach.
She’d known Patrick Johnson, at the time the administrator of Flagler County’s Health Department, who connected her to Dr. Stephen Bickel, the medical director at the department who was developing what became Flagler Cares with Revels, Johnson and Ken Mattison, at the time the CEO of what was Florida Hospital Flagler (now AdventHealth Palm Coast). “They hired me as a consultant to do some strategic planning and facilitation, and then they couldn’t get rid of me,” Baird said.
According to its just-issued annual report, Flagler Cares in the past year served 2,304 individuals (the number would be significantly larger if households are measured), providing, among other services, $221,000 in direct assistance (from utilities to rent to health emergencies or even, in one case, a water heater) and less directly measurable services such as counseling, benefit assistance and navigation (try securing disability or SNAP without help), and other services. (See the annual report here.)
“I’ve been doing this for 25 years,” Baird said. “I feel what we’re doing here in Flagler is everything I’ve ever complained about, everything that you always wish someone would do. I think we’re doing it. Because I definitely can be outspoken and I point out problems, and now we’re trying to solve them directly. In the past, with One Voice for Volusia, we didn’t provide direct services because we didn’t want to compete with our membership, which is all the direct-service agencies.” Providing direct client services “is just a whole different approach to trying to make a difference.”
The interview had to stop–it had already run well over its allotted time–as Baird was preparing to do what she does monthly: provide, with a staffer, a 60-minute combination overview presentation about Flagler Cares and tour of the 10,000-square-foot Village, this time to a group that included County Commissioner Leann Pennington, developer Jeff Douglas, and the Flagler Education Foundation’s Maryiotti Johnson and Madison Asbill. The overview took far longer than planned, too. It turned into a groupwide seminar on social services, the local economy and how the other half navigates through it all as synapses fired around the table. It was vintage Baird.
When asked about it, she said learning of the Above and Beyond Award surprised her. “I thought maybe it was just spam,” she said. “And then I’ve been looking, learning more about it, and some pretty amazing people have you recognized. So I don’t know. Nervous. Flattered.”
Last year’s keynote speakers at the Above and Beyond gala at Tallahassee’s Doubletree Hotel (same venue as this year’s gala on Oct. 8) were Florida Supreme Court Justice Jamie Grosshans and Senate President Kathleen Passidomo. 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. Last year’s winners included Lauren Book, the Founder and CEO of Lauren’s Kids and the Florida Senate’s minority leader, Beth Kigel, chair of the board of trustees of Florida Polytechnic University, Merritt Martin, chief of staff of the Moffitt Cancer Center, and Lindsey Zander, executive director of the Florida Education Foundation. Barbara Petersen, past president of the First Amendment Foundation and current executive director of the Florida Center for Government Accountability, is among the previous year’s winners.
The News Service of Florida is a statewide, Tallahassee-based news organization that covers state politics, courts and public affairs and is available by subscription. (FlaglerLive is a subscriber.)
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