My 1st Gig: From Taco Bell to City Hall — Rosalynn Bliss on Work Ethic, Showing Up, and Trusting the Path
by Ryan Brown
What a former Grand Rapids Mayor from Sault Ste. Marie can teach us about leadership, community, and earning your seat at the table.
There’s a particular kind of leader who doesn’t set out to lead. They don’t picture themselves behind a podium or at the head of a commission table. They just keep showing up, doing the work, raising their hand, and somewhere along the way, the room starts turning to them. That’s Rosalynn Bliss.
Most people in Grand Rapids know Rosalynn as the former mayor who steered the city through a decade of real momentum, economic growth, infrastructure investment, and community trust-building, before stepping into her current role as assistant dean and chief external relations officer at Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine. But when she sat down with me on My 1st Gig, we went further back. All the way back to a drive-through window and a family that knew one thing for certain: you work.
No One Was Going to Give Her Anything
Rosalynn grew up in Sault Ste. Marie in a family of ten kids. She has six brothers, three sisters, and a dad who was a brick mason, often traveling to Detroit for work in the winter. Her mom worked at a grocery store. Everyone pulled their weight. At 14, Rosalynn got her work permit. So did every one of her siblings.
“We just knew that for most things we wanted, we had to figure out how to pay for them,” she told me. “Whether it was a car or a class ring or a dress for homecoming.”
That’s the kind of upbringing that doesn’t leave you. It follows you into every job, every room, every moment where you could either coast or push a little harder. For Rosalynn, it became the engine behind everything.
Before she ever set foot in a hospital or a city commission meeting, she was waitressing and bartending at Antlers in the Soo, a job she held for five years and genuinely loved. Even before the coveted Antlers job, she was also doing stints at McDonald’s and Taco Bell, which taught her a different but equally valuable lesson: what a bad boss looks like. “I worked with a lot of people who probably shouldn’t have been a supervisor,” she said. “And I was like, if I’m ever a manager, I’m not going to be like that.”
That observation, made as a teenager behind a fast food counter, turned out to matter more than she could have known.
The First Real Gig
After a double major in psychology and criminal justice at the University of South Alabama where she was taking 15 to 20 credits a quarter while working full time, Rosalynn landed at Michigan State for her master’s in social work. A professor there saw something in her before she saw it in herself. “You sound like a social worker,” he told her, and pointed her toward the School of Social Work. She never looked back.
Her first professional position came at DeVos Children’s Hospital, working on the Child Protection Team alongside forensic pediatrician Dr. Pelosi. It was serious, demanding work — medical social work with abused and neglected kids, forensic interviews, court testimony, clinical sessions with children and parents. And then there were the prevention programs she started building from scratch.
One of the first cases she worked involved a baby who had suffered severe brain damage after being shaken by a babysitter. It had a profound effect on her. She started reading journal articles and found a hospital program in New York that had cut abusive head trauma cases by nearly 50 percent in the first year of a baby’s life. She brought it to Dr. Pelosi. He said: write a proposal and take it to the Children’s Hospital Foundation.
She did. The foundation not only funded it — one board member bumped her ask from $30,000 to $50,000 on the spot.
“I think what I learned,” she told me, “is that if you’re given the opportunity to lead on something you care deeply about, you can make incredible things happen.”
Leadership That Finds You
When I asked Rosalynn whether she always knew she wanted to be a leader, she paused. “I don’t know if I ever saw myself as a leader,” she said. “I ended up organically becoming one.”
In undergrad, she became president of Psi Chi, the psychology honor society. She didn’t campaign for the role, but she ended up with it because other people pointed at her and said she should. In grad school, same thing. At the children’s hospital, she started joining community task forces and boards for domestic violence response and sexual assault prevention. She’d raise her hand for projects. She’d follow through. And then people would come back to her for more.
“Once you prove that you are reliable, trustworthy, and you care deeply, people organically want you to lead,” she said. “Because you show up, you follow through, and you’re responsible.”
She also credits Dr. Pelosi as one of the great bosses of her career — a stark contrast to those early service-industry experiences. Where some supervisors used authority to diminish, he used it to unlock. He gave her permission to try things, pushed her to make the case for ideas she believed in, and then got out of her way.
From the Children’s Hospital to City Hall
Rosalynn was still at DeVos Children’s Hospital in 2005 when a small group of women she’d gotten to know through community work said: you should run for city commission. She was 29, living in a small apartment downtown, working two jobs and not particularly looking for a new one.
She went to a few commission meetings. She heard them talk about closing the city’s swimming pools and cutting parks programs. That landed hard. She knew neighborhoods, and she knew what those spaces meant to kids and families. So, she ran.
Spoiler alert: she won. And then she spent the next decade as Second Ward Commissioner doing exactly what she’d done at the hospital: identifying a problem, researching best practices, building coalitions, and making things happen. She chaired a blue ribbon commission on parks, helped launch the Friends of Grand Rapids Parks nonprofit, and championed a parks millage that she later made evergreen so future mayors couldn’t quietly defund it.
Mayor Hartwell eventually encouraged her to run for mayor. She did. She won that, too.
What She’d Tell a Young Professional Starting Out
Before we wrapped up, I asked Rosalynn what she’d say to someone standing at the beginning of their career, unsure of the road ahead.
She gave me three things, and I think they’re worth writing down.
First: say yes. Try something new. Even if it intimidates you, find the courage from somewhere and walk into the room like you have a right to be there. Because you do.
Second: follow through. Your professional reputation starts the moment you step into a room. If you say you’re going to do something, do it. It sounds simple. It is simple. Most people don’t do it consistently.
Third: build meaningful relationships. Not transactional ones. Real ones. “Doors will open for you because of the relationships you build,” she told me. “And other people will see things in you that maybe you don’t even see in yourself.”
That last part is the through line of Rosalynn’s whole story. Her career is built not on ambition alone, but on the quiet, compound interest of showing up, caring, and letting the people around her reflect back what was already there.
She grew up in a family of ten in the U.P. She waitressed through college. She became mayor of one of the fastest-growing cities in Michigan. And now she’s helping build the next generation of community health partnerships across the state.
Not a bad path for someone who started with a work permit at 14 and a lot to prove.
Rosalynn Bliss is assistant dean and chief external relations officer at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine. She served as mayor of Grand Rapids from 2016 to 2023. Listen to her full conversation on the My 1st Gig podcast.