Roz McGee found her life's work unexpectedly.
She was supposed to be a bank executive, an economist, a private sector businesswoman.But she had been out of the white-collar trenches for some time when, in 1987, she began looking for the perfect number-crunching job.
She didn't find it. Frustrated and somewhat desperate, she took a job about which she didn't know anything.
It was a little start-up, nonprofit organization, an offspring of Utah Issues, called Utah Children.
A decade later, Utah Children and Roz McGee are on the forefront of advocacy for children's issues in Utah. The former banker is now the agency's executive director. The once fledgling nonprofit has an annual budget of $200,000.
"I initially didn't consider the position because I didn't know anything about children's issues," McGee said. "Then I realized I knew the advocacy part. I just had to learn the children's issues."
The North Carolina native first learned advocacy when her three children were young. There was the issue of housing for low-income families, then education. She eventually served on the national board of the League of Women Voters. She moved to Utah in 1982.
McGee has become a fixture at the state Capitol on any issue that involves Utah's youngest residents. From education spending to foster care and juvenile justice, McGee can be found in interim meetings throughout the year and at the Capitol for those seven legislative weeks in January, February and March.
Once the session is over, she and other advocates issue a report card on the lawmakers' successes and shortcomings.
In the decade McGee has spent in the advocacy arena, she's seen more importance placed on child and family issues. But her work is unfinished.
"There is general support for children and families here," McGee said. "But there is a great gap about how to translate that general support into real support."
Unlike some, McGee says she doesn't dread the start of the Legislature. For her, it's a culmination of a year's work and the anticipation that this year's session will be even more beneficial for Utah's children than the year before.
This year, Utah Children will actively support the governor's commitment to spend $16 million in state funds in order to receive all the available matching federal funds for the new Children's Health Insurance Program. McGee said her organization will also lobby in favor of the creation of a "critical" child care task force.
The task force would look at issues facing child care providers and consumers.
"We need to look at policies that affect affordability and the basic level of child-care quality for subsidized and unsubsidized families," McGee said. "It's critical that we not create a two-tier system of child care: what the rich folks get and what the poor folk get."
A task force would also mean a dozen or so legislators would have the "opportunity to learn in considerable detail" what is being done to care for the more than half of Utah children in day care, McGee said.
But the Legislature is not the only place to which McGee looks for change. She wants to see the state's employers, governments and nonprofit organizations realize the importance of dealing in family-friendly policies, ones that would promote better child care, insurance and attitudes when it comes to families' needs.
And, that needs to be combined with community involvement at school board meetings, city councils and the like, she said.
"If we were making good decision at that level, we'd need less from state lawmakers," she said. "It doesn't take laws. It's simply good business."