BusinessReport.com

Sometimes, women opt out of full-time, fast-track careers to spend more time with their families. Men opt out, too, more often to start their own businesses. And then there are those rare birds who opt out because they want a career—no matter how drastic the pay cut—that contributes to the greater good.

Such is the case with Karen Stagg.

In May, Stagg walked away from her position as a vice president with Amedisys, where she managed 75 employees. Over the years, she had risen through the ranks of health care operations with various companies, having started in customer service about 20 years ago.

Stagg, 44, left Amedisys to take a position with a small Baton Rouge nonprofit called Connections for Life, which helps women exiting prison transition back into society.

“I had always wanted to do something to help people in need,” she says.

But working 12- to 14-hour days as well as weekends didn’t give her much time. She liked her work, though, and had no plans to leave it, until a fateful conversation with her friend and pastor, the Rev. Chris Andrews of First United Methodist Church.

“I told him, ‘I really think I have this tug,’ but I wasn’t making any formal plans,” she says.

Simultaneously, Andrews had learned that Connections for Life was looking for a new director. Its founder and leader, Myria Andre-Martin, had experienced health problems stemming from an unfathomable 11 aneurysms over the years. Andre-Martin, beloved and respected by both the program’s participants and her peers, made emphatic plans to find a new director for the organization. “I’m a walking time bomb,” she says.

Andrews mentioned the situation to Stagg. “It took me a few days,” she says, “but I’ve never second-guessed it.

“Amedisys was incredibly supportive,” Stagg says. So was her husband, a CPA.

Stagg’s salary at Connections is one-third of what it was at Amedisys, but she says her days are both rewarding and humbling.

“It’s as exciting as I thought it would be and more challenging that I thought it would be,” she says.

The challenges come from working with a group of women the majority of the world ignores. Stagg and Andre-Martin say that most of the women have every strike against them when they get out of prison. Most struggle with addiction. They’re frequently disconnected from families. Prison has left them ill-equipped to deal with a fast-paced world. They have no money, nowhere to stay and haunting pasts. Some were even forced into childhood prostitution by their own drug-addicted mothers.

Andre-Martin and Stagg are currently working side by side as Stagg gets used to a new professional world. It used to be that most of her day was spent doing paperwork. Now, every day is hands-on. She’s as likely to travel to St. Gabriel to interview potential participants at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women as she is to hunt for private funding for the small program.

Connections for Life, founded in 2000, is a one-year program that provides women just released from prison an efficiency apartment, a job, addiction counseling and transportation anywhere they need to go. It can accommodate 13 residents at a time. Andre-Martin, who also founded Myriam’s House, was inspired by Catholic laywoman Edwina Gateley, founder of Sophia’s Circle in Chicago, for recovering prostitutes.

“Mentoring these women is so different from mentoring the employees I used to have,” Stagg says, “but you have so much respect for them because they have to work so hard. The women are the primary focus. They do the work. We want to help build the right structure around them.”

Stagg says she’s not sure she would have made the leap without the opportunity falling into her lap.

“Sometimes change happens and you just do it.”