Sabrina Corbin

Michigan Nightlight: What does being a leader mean to you?
Starr Commonwealth Battle Creek  Executive Director Sabrina Corbin: As leaders, we are here to serve others and to help them grow. I’m talking about everyone we serve and impact: our staff, our administrative team, our clients, everyone. I have always believed in service leadership. It has always been my style, and I am very fortunate to have discovered an organization that shares that same belief.
 
What is your dream for kids?
My dream is that someday, no child will ever need us. If kids didn’t need an organization like Starr Commonwealth that would mean that all families were functional. It would mean that there were no more neglected children and no more abused children. It would mean no more traumas for kids in their schools and in their homes. If that were the case, there would be no homeless children and no hungry children. If kids did not need us, they would all be doing well, with their needs met in healthy ways.
 
What is one concrete thing that could be done to improve the environment for social sector work in Michigan?
The biggest thing I can think of is to be able to give staffers across the social sector the training and the mentoring that they need to accomplish their jobs. We are lucky to be able to offer this at Starr. We do crisis intervention and we reach out to

We want to know if the kids have stayed in school, if they have been more successful academically than they were before, and if their behavior has improved.

make the biggest impact that we can to help people. We have helped the victims of disasters like Hurricane Sandy and the tsunami in China. All of our staff members are trained and certified in the specialized areas of trauma and loss.
 
How do you know you’re making progress?
We conduct lots of customer satisfaction surveys. We survey our children and their families while they are in our programs, and we follow-up with them at three, six and 12-month intervals afterward to see where they are and to find out what kind of impact our services had on them. We want to know if the kids have stayed in school, if they have been more successful academically than they were before, and if their behavior has improved. We want to find out if they have committed crimes or if they have learned to stay out of trouble -- generally, how they have progressed since they left us.
 
We also survey our referral service providers, like Community Mental Health, the Department of Human Services, school personnel, local courts, and probation officers, to determine how satisfied they are with our services. The results are very positive; they tell us that we are making progress.
 
What are you most proud of?
I’m most proud of the impact that we have made here at the Battle Creek location and the numbers of kids and families we

Some people wonder why on earth we would choose to do this work, because so many of us could have chosen other career paths. We could have earned so much more money. We could have lived with so much less stress. But this is our calling.

have been able to serve. On a daily basis, we impact around 250 kids each day here with all of all the treatment programs included and all of the services that we offer.
 
What originally drew you to your current profession?
I didn’t choose this profession. It chose me. Helping people is in my make-up and it is something that I have always felt a need to do. I had a happy, typical childhood with no worries. My family wasn’t wealthy, but I had everything I needed. I haven’t experienced the things that the children who come into our programs have experienced, so it’s not an environmental thing. It is inherent.
 
But I have to help children in crisis and I have felt this way all of my life. I think that if you asked that question to almost anyone who works in this profession, they would tell you the same thing. Some people wonder why on earth we would choose to do this work, because so many of us could have chosen other career paths. We could have earned so much more money. We could have lived with so much less stress. But this is our calling. This work is my calling. I was born to do this.