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Generosity: Sandy Ratliff
 If you were a new Cunningham staff member, you wouldn’t guess that Sandy Ratliff works nights, given the time she contributes to trainings and staff appreciation events that take place during the day. This deeply-held spirit of generosity carries through all of her work.
Sandy has been Cunningham’s night manager since 2000. She teaches TCI, First Aid, and Basic Safety to staff, as well as providing ongoing and continuous feedback to the primary on call staff she supervises. Sandy used to be a teacher, and her background informs her commitment to giving staff the tools they need to work effectively with our youth. Her caring and supportive approach to kids and staff comes through as she guides her staff and teaches new skills both in the training room and and on floor of the residential units.
Sandy’s generosity goes above and beyond the expectations of her role as night manager. She has made many personal sacrifices such as cancelling vacations in order to be at work when the residential program was experiencing particularly low staffing levels. She stays late into the night if the campus is unstable and maintains her positive and hopeful attitude even when there are multiple crises erupting around her.
Sandy also gives generously of her time on projects that help staff take care of themselves and their loved ones. She has been a leader on the agency Wellness Committee, and infused the agency’s Relay for Life Committee with a spirit of determination and fun. Wearing a Hawai’ian shirt and lei, bringing laughter to the work of raising money for cancer research, Sandy inspires her team to believe their efforts really can improve the life of someone who is battling cancer.
Describing what she likes about her job, Sandy once remarked that she loves coming into a difficult situation and discovering she can help. She laughed and exclaimed, “I love plunging toilets! I really do!” She described being called by staff trying to manage an unstable milieu, when on top of everything someone had put something down a toilet, making the whole situation feel like an overwhelming mess. She grinned as she described striding in with a toilet plunger, happy to have such a concrete and immediate way to help.
Sandy is not in this work for the glamour. She is a deeply hopeful and deeply generous person who cares so much, she can’t help but smile.
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