A Hospital in East Los Angeles Reaches Out to Local Residents and Increases Its Fund-Raising Power

BRAINSTORMS

By Rebecca Gardyn

The gala benefit dinners and golf tournaments just weren’t working anymore. In truth, the events, which had been staples of White Memorial Medical Center’s fund-raising efforts for years, never did bring in the kind of money the nonprofit hospital in East Los Angeles really needed. The health-care resources that the institution wanted to provide for its largely indigent, Hispanic constituency required far bigger sums than the mere $300,000 to $575,000 its foundation had consistently raised each year.

Then, in 1997, the hospital’s chief executive officer made a decision that ultimately changed the institution’s financial fate. That decision, says the CEO, Beth D. Zachary, was to put her trust in Mary Anne Chern, a fund-raising veteran with 25 years of experience, whom she hired as president of the White Memorial Medical Center Charitable Foundation.

In less than five years, Ms. Chern put in place a strategic plan that has met the challenges of fund raising in poor, inner-city neighborhoods. Under her leadership, the foundation has raised more than $16-million in donations, increased its total number of donors from 532 to 2,000, and garnered 17 government and foundation grants, after years of not getting any such awards.

The recent fund-raising success has beaten formidable odds. White Memorial Medical Center, founded as a Seventh-day Adventist teaching hospital in 1913, is located in the neighborhood of Boyle Heights, east of downtown Los Angeles. According to U.S. Census figures, the 97 percent Hispanic neighborhood has the lowest median household income in the city ($19,324, compared with a citywide median of $34,955), and 70 percent of residents have less than a high-school education. State statistics show that the neighborhood has the city’s highest unemployment rate (9.6 percent compared with 5.6 percent citywide), while a 1998 survey conducted by White Memorial showed that 40 percent of residents live in poverty. The hospital had little success finding wealthy individuals in Boyle Heights who would be willing to give, and the lack of major businesses in the area offered few opportunities to attract local corporate gifts.

Ms. Chern, who had previously served as foundation chief executive for five other hospitals in California and New York, understood those roadblocks before taking the post, but she also saw potential in the ties that neighborhood residents had with the hospital. “It is a poor community, but people give what they have,” she says. “They love this hospital. Many of their grandparents were born here. So when they are invited to be involved, they are very open about what their needs are.” But because the Charitable Foundation’s board of directors had for years been composed primarily of wealthy, Adventist, Caucasian doctors with few ties to the poor, Catholic, Hispanic population it served, those invitations for involvement rarely materialized.

Remaking the Board

Changing that was Ms. Chern’s first order of business. She approached members of the foundation’s board of directors and asked 20 out of 25 of them to resign so they could free seats for new trustees. “The board was very insular,” says Ms. Chern. “Without wealthy donors and businesses to tap, we needed to reach out externally and involve leaders who truly represent the constituencies we serve.” Today, half the board’s members are Hispanic, and their ranks represent not only the medical profession but also the banking, accounting, legal, business, and media fields.

“The bar has certainly been raised in terms of expectations for the board,” says Pam Anderson, a government-relations consultant who has served as a White Memorial trustee for eight years and is currently the foundation’s chairwoman. “In the past, some board members saw their job as little more than buying tickets to the gala dinner,” she says. “Mary Anne has made it very clear that those events are the last priority. She has encouraged us to use our relationships and personal talents to find creative ways to bring in resources.”

For instance, because of her connections with local advertising agencies, Ms. Anderson brought in $50,000 in free billboard advertising. Board Vice Chairman Miguel Martinez secured a gift of $350,000 from Oscar De La Hoya, an East Los Angeles native, thanks to a personal friendship with the boxer’s family. Other members of the board bring to the table relationships with city and county government leaders, who in turn use their own contacts to drum up support.

But changing the board was only half of Ms. Chern’s plan. Because donations from wealthy people had been rare, White Memorial set its sights on government and foundation grants. To show those entities that White Memorial’s objectives reached beyond its hospital’s walls, the foundation formed a series of partnerships with other local nonprofit organizations. White Memorial joined with such groups as Goodwill Industries of Southern California, the Latino Community Diabetes Council, and QueensCare, a nonprofit health clinic that serves poor and uninsured Angelenos, to identify resident needs and to apply together for grants to help fulfill those needs.

Productive Partnerships

One such collaboration is with the Mexican American Opportunity Foundation, in Montebello, Calif., a provider of child-care services for children from low-income homes. In focus groups with residents and in conversations with hospital staff members, Ms. Chern discovered that one of the biggest unmet needs of both groups was quality day care. Together, Ms. Chern and Martin Castro, president of the Opportunity Foundation, applied for a series of grants for a bilingual, multicultural day-care program at White Memorial that would serve both the children of needy neighborhood residents, whose tuition would be state-subsidized, and the children of hospital staff members. The collaboration secured $200,000 in community- development block-grant funds and $220,000 in grants from five foundations. The MAOF/WMMC Rainbow Children’s Center opened in East Los Angeles last year.

“We’ve got centers all across the state, and this is the only one where we have a collaborative effort,” says Mr. Castro. “It is also the only one where upper-income and lower-income children from various cultures are intermingled and able to learn from one another.”

Ms. Chern encourages other nonprofit groups to build similar partnerships and says that doing so helps to attract money for two primary reasons. First, it shows grant makers that community groups are working together to ensure that they do not duplicate services. Second, it illustrates that those groups have delineated their priorities and how to handle them.

Even so, Ms. Chern understands why some organizations may hesitate to join forces. “Foundation and government grants tend to encourage collaboration but often still only allow one entity to apply,” she says. “Also, it’s easier on staff not to collaborate. So, if they have sufficient individual major donors who can meet their philanthropy needs, I can understand the reluctance to get involved in a major collaborative effort.”

The Rewards of Outreach

But for White Memorial, the effort has paid off, as is evidenced by the number and size of grants it has secured. The outreach that resulted from a need to find donors has also helped the hospital better prepare itself to carry out its mission. The Charitable Foundation’s new emphasis on outreach attracted the support of Robert Ross, president of the California Endowment, the state’s largest health-care foundation. In 2000, the California Endowment provided White Memorial with $1-million for its Cultural Competency and Residency Training Program, which teaches doctors and medical students how to be sensitive to their minority patients’ specific needs. “The reason that so many minorities suffer high rates of lifestyle diseases like diabetes and cancer is because many health-care providers are unable to connect with ethnic populations in ways that influence behavior,” says Dr. Ross. “What we saw at White Memorial was a willingness to seriously examine how the training could be different in preparing doctors to work with diverse communities.”

White Memorial’s new emphasis on outreach has not only helped it bring in more funds and programs, but also increased its return on investment. In 1996, the operating costs of the Charitable Foundation was $300,000, or about 52 percent of the amount raised that year. In 2001, the operating costs plummeted to 10 percent of total funds raised.

White Memorial’s turnaround required very little monetary investment by the hospital, aside from Ms. Chern’s salary and that of one additional full-time fund raiser and one half-time clerk. But what the plan did require was patience, says Les Helmuth, chair of the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ awards committee, which earlier this year gave White Memorial the 2002 Award for Excellence in Fundraising. “Often what is most effective isn’t the most efficient,” says Mr. Helmuth. “It takes a long time to build relationships with people in the community, and White Memorial’s CEO and development officer trusted each other enough to take that time.”

Other organizations can learn by the hospital foundation’s example, says Mr. Helmuth, but they should not expect smooth sailing. “For collaboration to work, all parties have to give up their competitive goals and resolve personality differences,” he says. “It’s not easy. But if, as a staff, we can step back far enough to let our egos by and allow the community to be involved in ways that give them meaningful engagement with the organization, you can see, through the efforts of White Memorial, what powerful things can happen.”

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