McGuire retires after 36year career supporting seniors and disabled
Jim McGuire is calling it a career after spending nearly 40 years working to support southeast Michigan’s most vulnerable residents.
For the last 36 years, McGuire, 64, has served in various leadership positions at Southfieldbased Area Agency on Aging 1B (AAA1B), a nonprofit serving as southeast Michigan’s largest provider network of support services for the area’s older and disabled residents as well as family caregivers. AAA-1B, established in 1974, serves residents in Livingston, Macomb, Monroe, Oakland, St. Clair and Washtenaw counties.
Most recently, McGuire served as the organization’s director of research, policy development and advocacy. In 2017, he was named interim CEO and tasked with changing the agency’s culture during a time in which the organization was going through a leadership crisis and was saddled with money-losing programs.
Among his many accomplishments, McGuire founded the Silver Key Coalition in 2015, a group of statewide aging-services advocates, to lobby for more state funding to support in-home care services for low-income Michiganders who did not qualify for state aid, but who were too poor to afford private services on their own.
According to McGuire, the coalition’s work led to a 46% increase in state funding over a four-year period for home- and communitybased services.
“I’m essentially an entrepreneur in a nonprofit world,” said McGuire. “In the business world you build companies and scale up and plan to grow and maybe be bought out. I started a halfdozen nonprofit and program rather than companies. It’s all the same thing; some people like the deal. Getting a grant is like creating something of value from nothing — you get addicted to the thrill of doing deals. That’s why I write so many grants.”