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Bridging Troubled Waters

cmCandace Cole-McCrea currently serves on the state and Strafford County Councils on Aging, the NH Mental Health Planning Council;  the Disability Rights Board and chairs its council on mental illness.  She also works on the national NAMI board for ethnic issues.  She chairs the state Council on Mental Health and Aging.

She has served on her local school board and Library Trustee. She is a member of her local agency’s Family Support Council and serves of the state’s Council for Special Education.  

Candace currently teaches human potential studies at the Strafford County Jail, using a curriculum that she has designed to help empower inmates and reduce recidivism.  She is a nationally certified Employment Specialist.   She is a certified trainer for the Center for Professional Excellence, which conducts trainings for the  staff of DHHS/DJJS.      She has managed a group home for violent youth, served on the board of a battered women’s shelter, fostered many disabled children and after her widowhood, adopted one, now aged 18.

Bridging Troubled Waters enables Candace to reach out to the many communities that she serves.

Thorn Bushes Have Roses

THORN BUSHES HAVE ROSES—BRIEF SYNOPSIS

Candace has lived through two major eras of American history and is now immersed in a third, as she also begins her third stage of life and looks ahead into her senior years.  Her early years mirror the myopia of a culture emerging from a world war, wishing for nothing more than to go home each night and shut the door on horrors, ugliness, pain and poverty. She was one of those shut out.  She writes about this dark time in American history as she experienced it, with its rigid caste system, discrimination and blindness to the needs of women, minorities, the mentally ill, the disabled, the elderly, and people of color.  She writes of her experiences of rape, battering, disability, victimization, discrimination, of being shunned, as she lived as an outcast, labeled, treated and stigmatized as mentally retarded and socially retarded, disabled and a minority.

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