June Ardis Dunn

June Ardis Dunn (nee Hansen) passed away peacefully on Friday, April 15, 2022 at Peace Health Hospital in Vancouver, accompanied by her husband of sixty-five years William H. Dunn ("Bill") and her daughter, Karen K. Dunn and Karen’s husband Ken Mapp. She said that she recognized the end of her life and was calmly accepting its inevitability. She is, and will be forever, deeply mourned by her family and the many friends that have had the pleasure and satisfaction of knowing her. She had 3 children, 8 grandchildren, and 2 great grandchildren.

June was born on June 15, 1932, in Portland, Oregon, to Lillian Hansen (nee Breitenstein), and Hans Richard Hansen. Both of her parents were of Danish descent and acculturation. Coincidentally, she was born three years to the day after the marriage of her parents and three years to the day before the birth of her sister, Barbara Jean Selby. She was particularly aware of these facts because they symbolized the cohesiveness of her family and culture. Her father was an ironworker, primarily fabricating large chain links for ship's anchors. Her mother was a dedicated homemaker.

June was very well educated and had an extensive and interesting career as a Social Worker, all this while being an active mom to three children and a devoted wife.

She started her education in at The Campus School, an extension of the Western Washington University teachers education program. After graduating from Bellingham High School in 1950 she attended Western Washington College for one year and then attended the University of Washington, graduating in 1954. She then worked as a social services trainee with the state of Washington until she accepted a scholarship to Columbia University School of Social Work in New York City. In 1957 she paused her masters program to marry the love of her life, "Bill" Dunn, in Seattle. Bill was in the army, stationed at Fort Ord, California, so she went to work for a private social service agency in Monterey for a year. After Bill completed his tour in army, she returned to Columbia University and completed her Master of Arts in Social Work. She was then employed by the state of New Jersey as a social worker.

In 1960 she gave birth to her first child, Karen Kimberly at Doctors Hospital in New York. In 1961, the family moved to Seattle. Her two sons were born there. John William in 1962 and James Hudson in 1964. During this time she was employed by the state of Washington, Department of Social Welfare.

In 1965 the family moved to Vancouver, Washington. Here she continued her work for the State of Washington as a social worker in the Department of Child Welfare, evaluating foster home care. In 1968 she became a professor at Portland State University, School of Social Work, in the graduate program, with the special focus on community mental health. She wrote a grant for developing curriculum for graduate students. She also helped develop a collaborative seminar in community mental health, in partnership with Oregon Health Sciences University, Department of Psychiatry and School of Nursing, and she helped bring many influential guest faculty from both state and federal agencies.

In the early 1980s, June became a leader in mental health services in downtown Portland, Oregon. She created a merger of several smaller mental health agencies into Mental Health Services West, which grew to be the largest non-profit community mental health agency in Portland during the 1980s and 1990s. She became the Chief Executive Officer of the agency and was a dedicated and passionate advocate for people with serious mental illness, and for policies and funding for services that supported them. She was very proud of her contributions to community mental health services and was always aware of the enormity and complexity of the social and economic challenges of providing quality care for the mentally ill.

After retirement from a productive and socially helpful career, June devoted herself to the happiness of her family and friends. In this endeavor she was enormously successful. She had a warm and generous personality, and she always took a personal interest in others. She had a way of making everyone feel special. She enjoyed reading, watching classic movies, gardening, and knitting. She also had an adventurous spirit and loved traveling and the outdoors. June will be sorely missed, but greatly appreciated, by all of those who had the good fortune to be affected by her life.

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