Nancy Arnold is used to reaching out and helping people-it's just her nature.

While working part time as a long-term care nurse for the elderly, Arnold is active in community outreach, discussing substance abuse issues with preteens and showing up every week to tutor middle school students in the Compact Program for disadvantaged youth.

Her involvement with the Detroit Black Nurses Association includes volunteering as a nurse and educator with various health care programs, offering direct care, teaching and counseling.

Arnold works in nursing homes, but spends many hours as a volunteer mentor and teacher for community and professional organizations that work to help young people. She's also been appointed by the Michigan Supreme Court to serve on the Wayne County Foster Care Review Board, which consists of volunteer citizens, as an expert on family wellness.

Arnold assists the foster care system by helping to identify family dysfunctions and evaluating ways to stabilize the lives of children and reintegrate families.

"We work with foster parents, biological parents, grandparents, social workers and others," Arnold said. "[There often are] physical illnesses or abuse involved so we talk a lot about the wellness of parents and the problems they deal with."

As a volunteer with MELL-Medical, Education, Legal & Law Enforcement professionals-she helps provide practical information about the consequences of alcohol and drug abuse. The team's goal is to strengthen the social skills of preteens and promote positive life options.

"In working with schools, teachers found many behavioral problems were the result of young people abusing drugs, so we look at interventions and how to help youngsters, whether they're smoking cigarettes or weed or whatever," Arnold said.

Arnold, who received her nursing degree from St. Mary's College in Minneapolis, also volunteers with the Rosa & Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development "Pathways to Freedom" program that sends young people through the southern states to investigate the path of the Civil Rights movement.

"They learn about history in a way that is beneficial, helps keep us from repeating mistakes, and creates a healthy mental balance," said Arnold, who has worked as a direct care nurse and in staff development at different hospitals before joining NexCare.

Arnold's volunteer work has even resulted in her offering personal sanctuary to some of the people she's encountered. An example is a high school student who relocated to Minnesota to live with her estranged father, but found his lifestyle to be intolerable. Arnold took the girl in, rent-free, and she ended up taking night classes, doing missionary work and obtaining a degree in nursing. She's now successfully raising a family in Minnesota.

When a business exchange student from South Africa had difficulties in the home where she was assigned to stay, Arnold gave her a place to stay during her studies at the University of Michigan. The student later got a graduate degree in Wisconsin and went back to South Africa, where she's now a television personality.

Another young man from the Ivory Coast arrived in the United States and was en route to Michigan when the family that was to host him changed their minds. It turns out they had assumed he was a French or white student. Arnold took him in saying, "I will not have this African return to Africa with no better American experiences than this blatant example of racism."

She thought he was a four-week summer scholar, but it turned out he was a yearlong student who ended up staying with her while he completed high school. He later extended his visa and completed engineering studies in Atlanta.

When an 82-year-old woman in failing health told Arnold her one desire was to bring her elderly sister from California to a Michigan nursing home so they could spend some time together before one of them died, Arnold took vacation time to help. She traveled with the woman to California, cleaned the house of the sister and prepared it for sale and then brought the woman, who uses a wheelchair, back to Michigan to stay at her home.

Arnold washed clothes, prepared meals and transported her to and from a day care center four times a week until placement in a nursing home was completed.

The sister was 102 years old and died at a nursing home two years later at 104 with both sisters being able to be together regularly during that time.