If she didn’t like her job so much, Combined Community Services Director of Client Assistance Peggi Lisenbee Wright would be finding it much easier to retire.

But since she loves it, she said retiring is “bittersweet.”

“It’s a blessing to have worked here,” Lisenbee Wright, 58, said Thursday.

Her last day with CCS is Aug. 15, and an open house is planned for her from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. Wednesday.

When Lisenbee Wright started at CCS in 1999, her position was front desk intake.

“Back in those days, we did everything from the front desk,” she recalled. “I worked for the same department I do now, but we did everything at the old building from the front desk – the intake, the client information, scheduling appointments, everything was done right there for the client assistance program.”

After a while, she moved over to work in the Project Independence program for a year or two as a case manager. When the position of director of client assistance opened up about nine years ago, Lisenbee Wright applied “because as much as I love the case management and believe in that, I found that my passion is always the emergency, the immediate.”

She got the job.

“I loved the part that CCS was already set up to offer food and clothing and Christmas (gifts) and school supplies and things like that, things that help people through their basic crisis or just not quite having enough money at the end of the week,” she said.

What she wanted to change in her new position was how the face of poverty was perceived in the community.

“I believe we did a really good job of that,”?she said.

When she first started, CCS’s average client was a single mother in generational poverty. Generational poverty is defined as a family having lived in poverty for at least two generations.

Lisenbee Wright said she and CCS tried to change it so the same people weren’t getting help all the time and spread help out over the year so other people had the option of receiving assistance. She also worked so local agencies like CCS and Salvation Army shared their information so they could help more people the best they could.

“And I wanted the perception, that people who are in poverty are lazy or don’t care or like it, to change. The reality is, there’s a very, very, very, very small group of people who cheat or don’t care that they’re staying where they are. I found that to be overwhelmingly true through just seeing them every day for years and years,” she said.

She said she doesn’t see very much generational poverty anymore. When she hears people talking in the community about poverty, she said the attitude toward people in poverty is much different than when she began at CCS.

“Instead of ‘oh, if they just get a job,’ it’s more ‘if we can help them get some training or if we can help them through this hump before the factory closes down at Christmas time, we can help them stand on their feet,’” Lisenbee Wright said.

Over the years in her job, she said she’s  witnessed the heart of the Kosciusko community.

“We live in a – I’ve said this to you over the years a thousand times – a uniquely awesome county. We really do because the  people here want to help, they want to be a solution, either hands-on or monetary. A lot of counties aren’t that way. ... It’s crazy how much Kosciusko County wants to give,” she said.

Her goal in taking the position of director of client assistance was to help people become self-sufficient as they defined it in their own way. That definition can vary from person to person, she said.

“My view of people in need was never in a box, and that’s probably the biggest thing I tried to change,” she said. “The majority of people are not lazy. The majority of people don’t like coming to CCS. And the majority of people don’t cheat.”

While CCS offers food, utility and school supply assistance, Lisenbee Wright said client assistance also offers help with resumes and long-term case management so clients can get out of poverty. In a story she’s told many times, Lisenbee Wright tells of how she took her daughter Lacey to the emergency room one time and the head nurse was one of her former Project Independence clients. “That’s why I stay at CCS,” she said.

Lisenbee Wright’s future may not include being an employee of CCS, but she knows what she hopes for CCS’s future.

“I’d like to see us continue to grow forward. The community just needs to support (CCS). Monetary support is always needed, and times change, focuses change, but really in our county ... what keeps the county healthy is keeping everybody healthy and CCS is one of the frontrunners in making sure that happens,” she said.

She said people just need to continue to support CCS, join forces with it and volunteer.

“CCS will continue to do awesome things. I really believe that,” she said.

Lisenbee Wright said she wants to write, volunteer and spend time with her family, including her grandchild in her retirement. Her volunteer work will bring her back to CCS.

“I want to go back to how I started and just love on clients, love on the people who walk in the door because that was always my passion – to chat, to catch up, to learn about new babies, and kids’ good grades and sports and what’s happening and pray with them. That was always what I loved about the job,” she said.