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Deborah Crown grew up in a large Polish family in Chicago where hearing loss was common. Several of her relatives had impaired hearing, and she watched them lip read when others were talking. Even as a young child, she made it a point to enunciate clearly when chatting with them. At age eleven, her mother suggested she volunteer at Misericordia, a home for people with developmental disabilities like Down Syndrome. Crown took the bus by herself three days a week and helped Misericordia’s nuns care for and comfort babies at the facility. She loved it and the nuns loved her. Perhaps it was the combination of those two experiences but from an early age, Crown knew “I wanted to be in a helping profession.” Today she works as a project manager for the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research (CROR) at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab.
A top student, Crown was the first person in her immediate family to attend college; she chose the University of Wisconsin at Madison where she received a volleyball scholarship to compete in the big ten conference and developed the discipline to work towards accomplishing a goal. She enjoyed a class in occupational therapy but she liked one in rehabilitation counseling even more. “Occupational therapists work on functional activities while rehabilitation counselors focus on adjusting to different abilities and vocational rehabilitation. They also evaluate a person’s current abilities and interests to develop return to work plans. That really appealed to me.” Crown decided to major in rehabilitation counseling.
After graduating, Crown became a residential facility director in a suburban intermediate care facility for people with developmental disabilities. “I learned a tremendous amount about working with people with disabilities and management skills. I came out of college and was already supervising people and a program.” She moved on to a job working with brain injury patients and felt like she had found her niche. Crown realized, though, that she needed additional education if she wanted to move into a job with more responsibility. She was accepted to the Illinois Institute of Technology’s graduate program in rehabilitation psychology. IIT was located close to Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood where her entrepreneurial grandparents lived in a two-flat close by. Crown moved into the upstairs apartment and kept her job while working on her degree.
She is adept at managing a diverse team, helping people bring out their talents and focusing them on achieving the project’s goals.
Allen Heinemann, PhD
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After finishing her master’s in 1987, Crown worked with a state coalition to mandate licensure of counselors in Illinois. Through that work, she was recruited in 1991 to the Vocational Rehabilitation department at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, which is now known as the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. After 10 years in the department, six of them as the director, Crown served as project manager for the $30 million rollout of an integrated electronic medical record system at RIC. When the three-year project ended, Crown segued to a position in human resources where she worked on implementing talent management systems including applicant tracking, employee onboarding and performance management.
She was ready for a new challenge in 2018 when she saw that CROR was looking for a project manager on a grant related to employment for people with disabilities. “It really appealed to me because it would take me back to my clinical training and use my project management experience,” she says. Crown also knew CROR Director Allen Heinemann, PhD, from some previous research she had done on returning to work after a stroke. She has had a busy two years at CROR because the department received two more multimillion-dollar grants last September, which required her to manage multiple projects simultaneously. Crown is happy that she made the move. “Working in research and with Allen, Linda Ehrlich-Jones and the CROR team has been a very positive and rewarding experience,” she says. “Research provides an opportunity for continuous learning and innovation. Allen is an amazing leader who supports his team to develop and pursue new, creative research ideas.”
Heinemann describes Crown as someone who “likes to focus on projects and other people and their needs. She is adept at managing a diverse team, helping people bring out their talents and focusing them on achieving the project’s goals.”
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Deborah Crown, MS, CRC, LCPC
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