Candeo
Director At-Large

Marcy spent eleven years in hotel and restaurant management in Dallas Texas before transitioning into the Human Service industry. While working on her master’s degree, she worked at Dallas MHMR (now the Dallas Authority) as an Employment Specialist. This was her first experience supporting adults with disabilities to find and maintain employment in the community. Her work as an employment consultant took advantage of both her business background and her passion for people. During the five years at Dallas MHMR, she later worked with the Employment Services Director to redesign the entire county wide employment programs and later was selected as a Regional Team Leader over one of the five newly formed regional employment teams.

At the same time as her employment at Dallas MHMR, Marcy provided contract work on the Texas Sheltered Work Conversion Grant. This work involved traveling around Texas to sheltered workshops to provide training to sheltered work staff to prepare them to provide supported employment services and to work with leadership to develop employment services. Under a private contract, Marcy worked with Kevin Edwards to provide employment services consulting to the state of North Carolina and again, they traveled to employment providers to train staff and consult on workshop conversion efforts.

After completing the master’s degree, Marcy relocated to Ankeny, Iowa (1996) as the CEO at Candeo (then Creative Community Options). At this time Candeo served approximately fourteen (14) individuals and employed seventeen (17) staff and, over time grew extensively, adding BI and Habilitation to the existing ID services. In 2023, Candeo added our IRSH services.

During her employment at Candeo, Marcy also worked for the Council on Quality and Leadership (CQL) for several years. For this work, she traveled around the nation providing either Personal Outcome Measures Training (POM), recertifying POM interviewers or serving on accreditation teams. This work was done between 1988 and 1992.



Marcy is married to Terry; they have three adult daughters and two granddaughters. Terry and Marcy enjoy gardening, biking trails, camping and hanging out with family.