A career of caring: Retiring DSHS employee will miss his clients

MOSES LAKE — Now that he’s retiring, David Plassman said he had something he wanted to say to the clients he’s worked with during 22 years with the Department of Social and Health Services.

“I’ve loved and cared about them over the years, and I’ve counted it as an honor to be part of their family and to be able to work with them. I will miss them, and they will travel with me as I move into retirement,” he said.

“I did want to say thank you to all the people who let me be part of their lives,” he added.

Plassman will retire at the end of the week. During his career with the Moses Lake office of DSHS he worked mostly with women who were part of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Most of them had young families or were pregnant when they first entered the program, he said.

He considers his clients part of the family, he said, and while he has other things he wants to do, retiring closes a big chapter in his life.

“I do care about them and I’m going to miss them very sorely, there’s no other way about it,” he said.

His goal was to help his clients through their immediate challenges, then help them get where they wanted to go.

“It (social work) is supposed to help people work with the systems they need to be successful in life, is a general broad-brush definition,” he said.

Part of that is determining what’s in the way – a mental health or substance abuse problem, medical conditions, an abusive relationship, a lack of education.

“But the part of the work that I’m most interested in is, I like to talk to my clients about what they want to do with their lives. What’s their dream for a job in the future, what have they done in the past, what kind of background can they bring to the table, and what stuff do we need to add on,” he said.

“I hand people a tool. And you hand somebody a tool, they can throw it down, they can sell it, they can give it away. Or they can pick it up and they can build a bookcase or a house or a life with a tool,” he said.

The right tool is going to be different for each person, Plassman said, whether it’s help finding a job, more education, support for a job interview, training for a career.

“There are lots of different tools we give each other. And I try to do that,” he said.

His own experiences gave him an interest in social work. Plassman said he lost the sight in one eye at birth, and in his other eye when he was about 5. He got an engineering degree, but his life went in a different direction.

He and his family fell on their own hard times, he said, and he met a lot of people who seemed to be struggling.

“I just started seeing a lot of people who seemed to be lost and hurting, and I started to have this notion that I wanted to do something to make it better somehow,” he said.

He started helping out at a Seattle church, then got the job with DSHS, starting in Moses Lake in September 1999.

He liked his job, he said, and even liked working at the office. The COVID-19 pandemic put an end to that, which caused a problem since his home system couldn’t do all the necessary tasks.

“I miss a lot of what I used to have,” he said, especially the interaction with clients.

In retirement he’s planning to move back to Seattle, continue with his volunteer work and maybe do some writing, he said.

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at cschweizer@columbiabasinherald.com.