We are CAN | Allison Collins

If you have ever reached out to CAN Council, the chances are high that the friendly voice on the other end was Allison Collins. She's the warm response to your inquiry email. The hello at the community event table. The person eagerly waiting to respond to your volunteer application, who genuinely wants to know how you hope to get involved and probably already has a list of ideas.

Allison has a strong sense of self, and that quality has a way of giving everyone around her permission to be themselves too. She makes people feel like they've been seen — not in a practiced, professional way, but in the way of someone who genuinely believes that every person who crosses her path is worth knowing. It's no accident. And it's exactly why she's the perfect fit to bring people into CAN Council.

Allison proudly grew up on the east side of Saginaw as the kind of kid who was always outside, always surrounded by people, always part of something. Her mom was a volunteer lunch aide at her school who had a habit of claiming students as her own. Her dad ushered at church on Sundays and spent his weekends on the planning committee of the Frankenmuth AutoFest, a commitment he has kept for as long as Allison can remember. Neither of her parents called it service. It was just what you did when you cared about the people around you. That lesson stuck.

She was a kid in the arts — in theater, in music, in the spaces where creative people gather and figure out who they are alongside each other. Those roots never left; they are still very much who she is. And long before she had a job title, she had a belief she carries to this day: if you want your community to reflect the world you think it should be, you have to show up and help build it.

As a teenager, Allison was convinced she wanted to be a pilot — a dream she held onto well into university before life pointed her somewhere else. What she found instead surprised her. As a volunteer student fellow with Rise, she helped grow the student vote and was part of the team that helped make the Michigan Reconnect program a reality. She was still in school and already learning what it felt like to move people toward something bigger than themselves.

Today, Allison is CAN Council's Community Engagement Coordinator, and true to form, the work takes her everywhere. A typical week could mean a team meeting, a community resource fair, a chamber of commerce event, an organizational overview presentation, and somewhere in between all of it, recruiting, screening, and onboarding the next wave of volunteers. She is, by her own description, the person who gets to connect the dots. She doesn't take credit for the picture that emerges. She just loves that she gets to see it.

Her first week on staff, Allison joined a CASA Volunteer monthly meeting. Within thirty minutes of meeting the volunteers gathered in that room — hearing about their work, about choosing to show up consistently for a child who had very few people in their corner — she was crying in front of everybody. It wasn't the job description that got her. It was the people living it. "CASA volunteers are just people like you and me," she says, "and they literally change lives by making a commitment to show up for a kid who needs a person looking out for them." She has seen it again and again since that first meeting, and it never gets old.

Allison will tell you that child abuse and neglect is not something that happens somewhere else or to someone else's family. Through her work, she has seen it reach into every kind of community and every kind of household. The people causing harm are almost always known and trusted. "There is no such thing as being too safe when it comes to who has access to your children," she says, "and there is never a bad time to be a safe adult for a child."

Outside of work, Allison compliments strangers. She lingers at art fairs, making friends with the local vendors she finds pride in supporting. She finds reasons to be delighted even when the world makes it hard. And when it's too hard, it's her partner, her friends and family, and the community she holds so close that fills her cup.

"I'm just the girl who gets to connect the dots," she says. But those dots? They’re everything.