- Date Of Birth: February 4, 1958
- Date Of Death: May 11, 2017
- State: Florida
Candace Lee “Candy” Seifert, 59, passed away on May 11, 2017, in Tallahassee. Candy joins her parents, mother, Irene (Sosnowski) Seifert, and father, Donald Seifert, Sr. Grandparents Amol and Christina Sosnowski, Otto and Margaret (Kniat) Seifert.
Candy is survived by “Aunt Dee” (Delores Ryskamp); Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Don Schmitt; her brother, Donald Seifert, Jr. (wife Mary) of Rockford, MI; and her sister Cindy Lackowski (husband Mark) of Grand Rapids, MI. Candy spoke often and fondly of her nephews Jared and Collin Seifert of Rockford, MI, and Anthony Seifert (wife Janna) of Charleston SC; her niece Robyn Decker (husband Bruce) of Grand Haven, MI; her great nephews Connor Lucas, Hayden Lucas, and Hudson Seifert; and her great niece Hildy Seifert who also survive her.
Candy was born in Grand Rapids where she graduated from West Catholic High School in 1976. In 1979, she earned a Bachelor of Science in Sociology and Anthropology from Central Michigan University in Mt. Pleasant; she was a proud CMU Chippewa. Candy was an active member of the Democratic Party in Michigan, serving as a delegate at a Democratic National Convention.
For more than 35 years, she worked with troubled youth and their families to help turn around their lives—in Michigan and in Florida. In July 1989, Candy joined the State of Florida workforce, working for the Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ). She worked with DJJ staff members in every region of Florida and with other agency staff members and service providers across the state; she held a special fondness for her time in Okeechobee and Fort Pierce and the friends she made there before transferring to headquarters in Tallahassee.
At DJJ headquarters, Candy worked for the Office of Residential Commitment Services where she served as the lead for the incident management response team, coordinating, reporting, tracking, and following up on all incidents pertaining to residential commitment programs. She performed legislative bill analyses, developed policies and programs, served as a leader—for three consecutive years—of the teams that interviewed one-third of all the youth in residential commitment programs in every residential program throughout the state.
She also worked in coordination with select teams to perform quality improvement reviews of existing programs and to evaluate proposals for new programs. In addition, her work included special juvenile justice projects such as gender-specific programming for girls, trauma-responsive services for all youth, and transition services for those youths returning to their home communities from residential commitment.
Candy was active in the community and on an international basis as an active member of the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation of America. She helped raise awareness of and research funding for the disease that she managed her entire life. Ultimately, complications from Crohn’s Disease triggered the rare type of skin cancer that took her life.
