Marcelas Owens’s 7-year-old sister Monique primed to become America’s next child health-care lobbyist

“So he and I had a discussion about both sides of it, and I pretty much left the decision up to him, for a couple of reasons, mainly because it was his birthday week, and I also want to give him the room to be a kid — he’s been through so much and it was such a big decision,” she said, and so she told the boy to sleep on it.

“About 4 a.m. he came downstairs where I was watching TV, and he sat down quietly and said, ‘Grandma, we have to go to D.C.’  I was surprised because he was so bent on going to wrestling.” Owens said Marcelas told her his mother had visited him in a dream. “She showed him the difference between what would happened in the world if health care passed, and what would happen if it didn’t. In the world where it passed everyone was healthy, and in the one where it didn’t everyone was sick and dying.”

Gina Owens said she has been a dues-paying member Wa-CAN, a 35,000-member community advocacy group, since 2001 when a canvasser came to her family’s door asking her to get involved in a pending agricultural bill. “The canvasser was telling me a little bit about what was going on with the bill, and asked me what I thought of the bill because my daughter and I were using food stamps. That’s how we got involved,” she said.

Owens became more involved after she was disabled in a car accident in 2001, and had to file for Social Security disability benefits. “It’s all grassroots volunteer work, I was going to events and workshops, and I was also speaking at events and rallies,” she said. “Around 2005, my daughter got involved when Wa-CAN started to work on fast-food chains and businesses that were not offering health insurance.” Her daughter, Tiffany Owens, was a manager as a restaurant.

“My grandson got involved in 2007 when his mom died, he was 7 at the time … and it was bothering him that when his mom died, she didn’t have health insurance. It was bothering him that she was working so hard for people who didn’t have insurance when she did, and when she lost her insurance she died.”

Marcelas’s grandmother explained his history of precocious behavior. “We talked a lot about what we were doing in the house, he liked to sit and watch the news, he liked to hear about the work we were doing with Wa-CAN. He would see us on stage speaking at events, and going to a lot of workshops and conferences, and it piqued his interest and he wanted to know what it was about.”

Owens said a local news station did a story about the elementary school Marcelas attended, which featured an interview with the whole family.

“That was the initial breakthrough,” she explained. “After they saw the Channel 9 thing, Wa-CAN talked with Marcelas about how that interview felt to him, and he started attending all of their meetings with me, and they would get him involved in small ways, like their summer youth conference.”

“Then Marcelas got small speaking roles — whenever I had a speaking role, he would take parts of my role and he would speak it, and it from there, and he started getting roles for himself.”

Owens said the biggest role was at a May 2009 health-care rally in Seattle, where she introduced her grandson to Murray, who was also speaking at the event.

“I had met her before,” she said. “I had met her because I had been to her office on a number of occasions with Wa-CAN, but she did not know that my daughter had passed, that was her first hearing of my daughter’s story. The next thing we know Wa-CAN was giving us a call that Senator Murray was actually using Marcelas’s story in congressional debates on health care.”

Some have questioned whether such a young child who recently lost his mother should be an advocate for national policy changes.

“Children re-grieve developmentally – when they’re 11 or 12, their understanding matures and they have a different understanding than when they were 7 or 8,” says Deborah Rivlin, an expert in child bereavement and a bereavement educator at The Children’s Room, a center for grieving children. “They may have more questions, they may ask what does this mean.”

Speaking specifically of Marcelas Owens’s case, she said, “It could be for him that that’s the way he’s making meaning of his mother’s death — it could be healthy. It depends on if he’s being pressured or not.”

Welter says that no one in the Owens family has ever received any compensation for their appearances, and that participation in their community organization is on a voluntary basis.

Marcelas couldn’t be reached for comment because he was in school.

Contact Aleksandra at: ak[at]dailycaller[dot]com.