CCPA alum leads efforts to improve quality of life for aging populations

When Mary Whitcombe-Turbush ’02, MPA ’19 takes on a job, she goes all in.

Born and raised in Broome County, where Binghamton is located, she now serves as the director for the Office for Aging, responsible for “improving and enriching the quality of life for all older persons” in the county.

With services ranging from in-home support to socialization programs to Meals on Wheels, her office covers a lot. But after years of finding ways to meet the needs of the community, Whitcombe-Turbush has learned the ins and outs of how to keep things running smoothly.

“I think some people believe they’ll graduate from school and just automatically become great leaders. I don’t see it that way,” she says. “I think you should experience every level of an organization to truly understand how to lead it. You should experience putting on a hairnet to serve food just as much as you should experience writing the grant that pays for that food.”

Whitcombe-Turbush’s immersion into roles that serve the community started when she became a preschool assistant at age 14. At 17, she started helping with an after-school program, and was the assistant director by the age of 19.

“When I jump into something, I tend to jump all in,” she says.

Her work continued through college, when she served as a director at the Boys and Girls Club of Endicott while studying sociology at Binghamton University. After graduating, she was hired by Catholic Charities of Broome County, where she worked for nearly two decades. Her first task was to create a new program to assist families in finding help for their children with mental health issues.

“Developing it from the ground up wasn’t as challenging as I was expecting it to be because I had done so much work with the community by that point. All of these experiences became pieces of a puzzle that I put together, and it built off of everything I had learned,” she says.

Her time at Catholic Charities led to her guest-speaking in College of Community and Public Affairs classes at the University, where she decided to eventually earn her Master of Public Administration (MPA) degree. A single mother working full time, Whitcombe-Turbush completed the program on a part-time basis over the course of five years.

“The MPA program really made me realize how human-service oriented local government could be. I didn’t realize there was this level of management within local governments to meet those needs,” she says.

That education in public administration helped push her to take on her current role with Broome County in 2021.

“The MPA program gave me the confidence to go outside of what I was comfortable with. Those classes and the ideas they exposed me to helped me consider how I could best use this education,” she says.

When it comes to effective leadership, Whitcombe-Turbush stresses the importance of teamwork.

“I can’t imagine I’d be in this leadership role without all of the work I’ve done with people over the years,” she says. “You need to understand where people are at every level of where you work, and that is very helpful in being a leader. We all have to work together to get important things done.