Social Work Alumna Reconnects After 47 Years

Cyndy (Beeson) Stevenson ’76, ‘79 was among some of the first graduates of EWU’s School of Social Work. Stevenson, who lives in Georgetown, Texas and was in town for a recent reunion, stopped by Cheney for a tour and to learn about the current program and share details about her professional journey.

During her visit, Stevenson met with School of Social Work faculty and provided a presentation about how coursework and applied learning at Eastern developed skills that afforded her flexibility and success throughout her professional journey.

Stevenson’s 47-year career spanned 14 different roles, including co-owning a consulting and training business in Canada and supervising social workers at a hospital on Whidbey Island in Washington. Her work has impacted student success, eldercare, mental health, corporate cultures, and hospice care.

Decades ago, as Stevenson prepared for an internship as a final piece in earning her master’s degree, she told Sonja Mattison, fieldwork coordinator for Eastern’s social work program, that her dream was to work with schoolchildren. At the time, Spokane Public Schools only had two social workers. Mattison reached out to her connections and made it happen – laying the groundwork for Stevenson to intern with Donna Hanneman, a respected social worker at Spokane Public Schools, who years later came to work as a professor at EWU.

“The internship went great, and then I ended up getting a job – my dream job with Spokane Public Schools as a school social worker,” she recalls.

Working her dream job in Spokane, starting in 1980, was what she thought she would do forever, but three years after starting the job, Stevenson married a Canadian, and the couple moved to Calgary, Alberta, where her career took a turn as she worked with patients in a cardiac rehab unit. Many had suffered heart attacks due to stress, prompting her to develop a technique called “responding versus reacting to stress, by mentally increasing your options” to help people manage the health impacts of stressful events and workplaces.

She later co-founded a consulting firm, Stevenson, King and Associates, conducting workshops that helped over 600 Canadian businesses. It was her favorite job, and she still conducts a small number of seminars and keynotes every year.

“One day I could be speaking in Banff to a physicians’ conference on how to give bad news in good ways, and the next day I’d be doing a leadership conference with managers at an oil and gas company, the next day a cancer retreat, the next day teaching faculties in schools, how to deal with difficult students and challenging cultures in their schools – I mean how blessed can you be.” She reflects, “It was just a niche that I happened to fill.”

After relocating to Houston, Texas, due to her husband’s job transfer, Stevenson worked inside public schools, continuing to help administrators and teachers learn how to serve students effectively.

Following a change in family circumstances, she returned to Spokane in 2004, with her two daughters, to earn a second master’s degree, a master’s in teaching, hoping to work inside of classrooms. Unable to find a full-time teaching job, she further developed her social work career, working in hospice care and going back to Spokane Public Schools to fill a role in “The Envision Program,” which provided students with alternatives to suspension. There, she developed a curriculum and textbook called “Legacies under Construction: How our choices define us.” Under her leadership, only 2% of participating students were ever re-suspended.

Since her early internship at Spokane Public Schools, social workers have become integral to educational teams. Stevenson was pleased to see, upon returning 21 years later, that Spokane Public Schools and Mead Schools had added many more social workers. “I’m thinking ‘yay, I helped that happen,’” she says.

By 2011, Stevenson moved to western Washington, taking a position established by the Washington State Office of the Attorney General to educate long-term care facilities, residents and their families on how to support patients with dementia without the mis-use of anti-psychotics. She worked for Seattle Children’s Hospital, WhidbeyHealth Medical Center, and Island Health in Anacortes before finishing her career as a social worker at Anacortes Middle School.

Throughout her career, Stevenson applied skills learned at EWU.

“I had many tools received from that program. The problem-focused model, “it just says focus on the problem that the person has, not the symptoms the person is showing. I also learned the power of ‘assessments over judgements’ and how to build and maintain community programs by knowing how to present research statistics. I took that into the corporate training and consultation world, all of my teaching and social work positions, small group meetings, and one-on-one sessions with patients or clients. It worked very well.”

Looking back, she’s grateful for the effort the social work program put into her education and internship. “The fact that they aligned my placement with me, my strengths, and my passion was huge.”

Stevenson says the cornerstone for well-being is a sense of significance and that Eastern provided her with that foundation. “They gave that to me, my internship gave me that – that you are significant – that’s what I took with me into every one of these 14 jobs, as an advocate for the well-being of all I served. And that each of us needs just one person to stand up for us. Just one. Be sure to be that person when it’s our time to stand up.”