Glen Newhart
Episode 191

Narrator:

Welcome friends to another episode of, The Story & Experience Podcast. Join your host, Japhet De Oliveira with his guest today and discover the moments that shape us, our families and communities.

Japhet De Oliveira:

Hey, welcome friends to another episode of The Story & Experience Podcast. If your brand new to the podcast, we have a hundred questions. They progressively become more vulnerable and open closer to 100. They're about stories and experiences that shaped this person into the leader that they are. And I'm delighted to be able to introduce you right now. And let me begin by asking them their name and if they could tell us, does anybody ever mispronounce it?

Glen Newhart:

No. My name is Glen Newhart. No, nobody ever mispronounces it.

Japhet De Oliveira:

They get it right every time.

Glen Newhart:

They get it right every time, but they tend to forget Glen, and they call me Gary for some reason. I don't think I look like Gary, but yes, Glen Newhart and I serve as president and CEO of the St. Helena Hospital Foundation here in our legacy site.

Japhet De Oliveira:

That's beautiful. Beautiful. Fantastic. How long have you been working for Adventist Health?

Glen Newhart:

So I joined Adventist Health about six years ago, June of 2019, just before COVID.

Japhet De Oliveira:

Yeah. Lucky you.

Glen Newhart:

It's been a blur.

Japhet De Oliveira:

It has. That's fantastic. Now you've been in philanthropy your entire life?

Glen Newhart:

Yeah, actually, interestingly enough, I can say that I was almost born into the nonprofit space. My dad started a nonprofit when I was five and a half years old, so I've always grown up around it and as a paid career. I started 31 years ago at an Adventist Academy. Gem State Academy was my first paid philanthropy job. And in year two, I was doing my first campaign and my office was at Georgia Cumberland Conference because a very young man and I felt very much fish out of water. I'm like, "Please, please conference president. Can I please move my office over to the academy where my wife was a teacher." And it's been nonstop since then.

Japhet De Oliveira:

That's amazing. That's fantastic. Hey, that's really good, really good. So where were you born?

Glen Newhart:

I was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and moved when I was 21 years old. Met my wife at my brother's wedding and said, "What the heck am I doing in Pennsylvania? I'm going to California."

Japhet De Oliveira:

She was from California.

Glen Newhart:

She was from SoCal and she was a student at La Sierra University. So yes, I was like, "Wow, wait, I can go to the place where avocados are not seasonal." It's very easy to forget that avocados weren't always available and growing up on the East coast, it was a specialty item and nobody liked Florida avocados ever. It was rare you could get Haas avocados back in. This would've been in seventies. And so I remember distinctly when my mom would buy these and it was new and my dad would never eat them, and my mom loved them, and so I learned to love them through my mom. And I'm like, "Wait a minute. I can go to the place where these are year-round." It didn't hurt that there was a beautiful woman here in California. That was not the motive. No, it was not the motive.

Japhet De Oliveira:

Avocados or her?

Glen Newhart:

I jumped on a plane with not much and I'm like, "I'm out."

Japhet De Oliveira:

Oh, hey, that's fantastic. That's a good love story. That's beautiful. When you grew up as a child, what did you imagine when you grew up to be?

Glen Newhart:

Interestingly enough, I was a kid who always dreamed of being an astronaut. In fact, when I was seven years old, I wrote a letter to the then administrator of NASA and volunteered to be the first child sent to space.

Japhet De Oliveira:

Wow, okay. This is diehard.

Glen Newhart:

Right? This is diehard. I was born a few months before the Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon. Obviously I didn't watch that, but I do have very early memories of sitting there and watching the last Apollo missions drive the rover on the surface of the moon. And I thought that was always so cool. I'm like, "They have a dune buggy on the moon." I'm like, "That would be awesome." And we had a space station back at the time that since crashed earth. And so my mom always encouraged me to follow things that interested me. And I came onto a very early... I think it was on PBS, Carl Sagan was talking about the universe.

And I sat there and I'm like, "Wow, this guy's brilliant." I am fascinated by what's out there. And so there was a NASA administrator that was part of some discussion and I thought, I'm going to write this guy a letter and volunteer. And so a couple weeks later or maybe a month later, I got a letter back and it said, Glen, thank you so much for volunteering to be our first child astronaut. We have absolutely no intention of sending children to space. We have no idea what it would do to you, but we encourage you to follow your dream and pursue the sciences.

Japhet De Oliveira:

What a good letter.

Glen Newhart:

It was a great letter. And it was handwritten back then. It was hand-signed, I should say. Back then it was obviously the secretary of Bull typing and probably went IBM's electric. But there was a little handwritten note and I just thought, "You know what? This guy was super busy. They're trying to figure out how to do amazing things for our country. And he took the time to write to a kid from Pennsylvania who had a crazy idea."

Japhet De Oliveira:

That's what I'm saying. That's amazing.

Glen Newhart:

Yeah.

Japhet De Oliveira:

Wow. What a honor. What a privilege. Hey, that's fantastic. Glen, if people were to describe your personality, would they describe you as extrovert or an introvert and would you agree?

Glen Newhart:

I think I am in large part an introvert, but my role requires me to be an extrovert. And I never really thought about this until I had a board chair that I worked with years ago who led a large corporation, and this was a hospital down in San Diego County, and we spent a lot of time together and I was interviewing him as part of my MBA program and I said, "How do you do this job? You have to be on all the time leading this company." And they were the leaders in their field worldwide. And he said, "Glen, the secret is I'm an introvert." He said, "It takes so much energy for me to be what people expect me to be. And over time I've become comfortable with it." And I think for me, that's probably the same thing.

I don't mind it. I enjoy it. Much like people who are maybe similar to me in some way. You're exhausted at the end of events. You're energized, right? Maybe you're the same way. You thrive off the energy of the people you meet in the stories. Because the stories are the currency we trade and people trust us with a lot of their stories and a lot of personal things. They would never tell anybody else, developed these relationships. But it is exhausting to a point, but at the same time, energizing. So when you're out and about and you do all these things when you come home and it's like, "How was the event?" "It was amazing." "Well, tell me more." I'm like, "Can I do that tomorrow? I need to recharge a little bit."

Japhet De Oliveira:

Now, some people you trust instantly, some people you don't trust. Obviously in your world, people trust you, they rely on you, they build stuff. Where did your trust come from?

Glen Newhart:

Where did my trust come from? For me, in what I do, I think people turn to us, turn to the hospital, turn to all of us. They're having their worst possible day and they need us to have our best possible day because they're trusting us. In my world, I'm not going to save anyone's life by doing a surgery or anything like that, but what I do is I help connect people to care they don't know exists. And I am that person for them. When we have that relationship where they can call at one o'clock in the morning and say, "I've got this going on, what do I do?" Obviously I'm going to say, "You need to get to the hospital." But they need to hear someone else say it.

And so a lot of the times I will get calls and say, "Hey, we're coming to the ER." And if I have the ability to do that and my day, I'll go sit with them as they wait in the ER. And I can't do anything other than pass the time and maybe crack some jokes and keep the atmosphere light. But for them, it creates an experience that was so fast. It's like, "I can't believe I'm in and out so quickly." And they may be dealing with really complex things, but it's just to have a friendly, familiar face there. And I know our team at this point, and I can talk about, "Hey, you know what? You're so lucky today. You have this doctor or that doctor and do you know this nurse has worked here for 30 years? She's so experienced. She's taken care of my own son or whatever it may have been from my own experience." And that sets their mind at ease, and they just kind of give themselves over to our team who's going to do an amazing job of caring for them. Trust is something it takes a while. I came to a community that I wasn't born in. But I think you prove yourself pretty quickly.

Japhet De Oliveira:

Yes, yes. And especially this community here that's very, they know each other very well.

Glen Newhart:

And I'm just someone who believes that trust is something you have to continually earn. And I don't mind doing that. I don't mind putting in the work to earn that trust. And once you're in one person's sort of circle of trust to make that sound corny, you're validated to other people and they want to connect you like, "Hey, I want you to meet Glen. He's at the hospital and I've had the opportunity to get to know him. You can trust him." And then you really become a trusted part of folks', extended family. And that's something that I take great pride in. And people will tell you things over your course of your career that they would never tell another human being.

Early in my career, I was working at a hospital, children's hospital up in Montana, and I spent a lot of time, four days a week probably out traveling the state, meeting donors. And there was a gentleman who was a farmer up on the high line, not far from the Canadian border, and he was born and raised on this property, never married, but he had the complete John Deere catalog in his barns paid for with cash. And I said, "Do you ever get lonely?"

And he said, "No, I really don't. I'm too busy." He said, "But I want to help. I never had kids myself. So I want to help your hospital. You're working with kids." And so we had this interesting conversation over many, many years, and I discovered that the furthest he had been from his property was probably a drive of a couple of hours down to Billings, Montana.

And after the first visit, I thought, "I like this guy. He's a really interesting guy." And funny enough, he had an interest in biblical prophecy, not from an Adventist perspective. I'm like, he started to talk about this. I'm like, "I know a little something about that, but you tell me what you're thinking." And so after the first visit, I just decided that I probably should go check in on him and he's alone. And I started to feel a little bit like I could be his lifeline to civilization. I mean, he was seven miles down a dirt road. And I was a little worried sometimes when I'd go in winter, I'd get stuck. No one would see me for days.

And so the second visit, I just decided that, "I bet this guy's never had a Costco apple pie." And so I picked up a Costco apple pie. I drove three hours to his house. I drove down the dirt road, he met me at the door and he had this, he's like, "What do you got?" And I said, "Have you ever heard of Costco?" He's like, "I've heard of it." I said, "They're famous for their apple pies." And he's like, "Can I make you some coffee?" And we sat there for four hours and he probably ate a quarter of the pie. And he's like, "You say, this is from Costco." For the next four years, about once a quarter I'd make the drive and I'd spend half a day there. But every time I take that Costco pie, funny thing is that Costco pie, we'd have a visit. I would never ask him for a donation. We'd just talk about what we were doing and what we hoped to accomplish. But after every visit a couple of days later, I check my mail, the hospital, and there's a check for five grand every single time. And there'd be a little note, looking forward to our next visit. I feel really a part of what you're doing.

This was a guy that never had kids himself, but had a soft spot for kids. So it's just interesting, the trust. Trust you build up.

Japhet De Oliveira:

It is. It is. That's beautiful. So with three hour drives and four hour visits, are you an early riser or late night owl?

Glen Newhart:

You know, do what the job requires. Sometimes you have those. I have 29 board members right now. We are a very large high functioning board, and I think we've grown the board since I've been here. And so I've learned that different board members like to communicate different ways. I have some board members that like to start texting at 6:30 in the morning and I'm okay with that. And first I struggled and I thought I had to respond within 30 seconds, but now I can triage those texts. Is this really important or could it wait until 7:45? And the board members understand that. And so it's this fun way of learning how people want to communicate with you, how they want to be connected and then exceeding their expectations.

Japhet De Oliveira:

Yes,

Glen Newhart:

We're in the hospitality business after all, and so that's fun.

Japhet De Oliveira:

Yeah, very Jesus way.

Glen Newhart:

Yes, he was available all the time. I'm not that available.

Japhet De Oliveira:

So now when you get up in the morning, drink coffee, water, what's your first drink of the day?

Glen Newhart:

Oh, it's definitely going to be coffee.

Japhet De Oliveira:

How do you have your coffee?

Glen Newhart:

I really love espresso.So yeah, I'm probably a three coffee in the morning guy that carries me through the day. And there's a little bit of... That's my way of connecting to the day, sitting there with a nice cup of coffee, quick scan through emails, because I wish I had the luxury of a different sort of morning, but it's usually jumping right in.

And I don't mind that though. I remember back early in my career, someone said, "Well, what does it take to motivate you?" "Nothing very." And so I think one of my first performance evaluations, self-starter, need supervision because there's so much to do. And so I think for me, it's like there are things I want to accomplish in a day, and I wake up with that list in my head. And some days, if you think about it as going a distance, some days the distances are far.

You can move a project miles and other days you're like, wow, I didn't get everything done that I wanted to do. How can I do that differently tomorrow? Why didn't I get that done today? And so it backs you up a little bit, but you keep working at it. And the fun is to do the things that are impossible. How can you... I haven't had a project yet where I was pitched on, "Okay, we need to do this." I haven't had a project yet where I've said, "No, we can't do that." And some things were pretty impossible, but like, okay, let's figure this out." If you think about things that at first blush would be impossible, you won't even start.

Right. Now we can't do that. Well, of course we can. You just have to think about it differently. You have to break those big things into smaller things and create ownership stakes for our community to be involved. How can somebody become a partner in this journey? That's good. And so in my morning, start with, "Okay, what do I need to accomplish today? What do I want to do? How can we expand the work we're doing? What opportunities are there for me to do better than I did the day before?" And so it's fun.

Japhet De Oliveira:

That's good. It's good. All right, last question for you, then I hand over to you to pick a number, but it's a leadership question. Are you a backseat driver?

Glen Newhart:

No, not at all. Not at all. I think one of the beauties of Avenue South St. Helena, is that we operate essentially as 140 7-year-old startup. We're incredibly entrepreneurial here. And so I work for a leader Dr. Steve Herber, that kind of empowers me to do that. We clicked from the first moment we met, and so I'm like, "I like this. This is someone that is trying to hire the best and then giving me the tools to do my job." And so when I think of that with my own team, it's about, "Hey, look, I think of it more in almost like a sports way." I could be a player coach. I think that would be the accurate way to describe it.

But everyone has a role and everyone has a voice. Ultimately, when a decision needs to be made, I'll make that decision, but I'm going to value your input. And so I like to invest in my people Japheth this week, two days ago, so incredibly proud of our mobile health leader who I hired five years ago as a brand new nurse. And her prior career was working in accounting at a winery, and she completed her master's in public health from UC, Berkeley.

Japhet De Oliveira:

Okay, great.

Glen Newhart:

And so she led us through the COVID Pandemic and all the incredible work we did. And so for me it's about investing in people. I love the fact that we're able to take people and move them up and train them and have them create opportunities for themselves and support them.

Japhet De Oliveira:

Fantastic. Great. All right then where do you want to go next? This is where you pick a number.

Glen Newhart:

Let's go with number seven.

Japhet De Oliveira:

Oh, actually, sorry, from 11 on. Oh, I gave question 11. Yeah, my bad.

Glen Newhart:

Okay, let's go with as a cowboy fan, let's go with number 22, Emmett Smith.

Japhet De Oliveira:

Okay. Share the best compliment you've ever received. Oh, I like this.

Glen Newhart:

The best compliment I've ever received. I don't do well with compliments, actually. It makes me very uncomfortable.

Japhet De Oliveira:

I can believe that.

Glen Newhart:

So I think that the best compliment I've received is when someone said, "You really made a difference for my family." And there was someone here that said, "If I hadn't called you that night, I think we would've had a horrible outcome for my loved one." They called me and they said, "Hey, this is happening, what do I do?" And I said, "Look, I think your loved one's having a stroke and you need to get here now." And so they brought the person in and I said, "I will meet you at the hospital." They were very uncertain about what to do. I will meet you. And I stayed with them until one o'clock in the morning and they said, "Look, nobody would've done this for us.

And I said, "Well, you are kind of like family here. This is a small town and I can't do this for everybody, but I'm honored to be here when you needed me." But it made me feel a little uncomfortable. I am just doing the little that I can. But they just wanted someone they trusted. And so they said, "Yeah, you're like family at this point."

Japhet De Oliveira:

We all need people. Don't we?

Glen Newhart:

Yeah, great compliment.

Japhet De Oliveira:

Hey, that's beautiful. Good. Thanks for being that person for that. Be All right. That was 21. So we're next.

Glen Newhart:

Let's go to 88. Michael Irvin. Okay.

Japhet De Oliveira:

You got to pick your numbers, right? Tell us about how your life has been different than what you imagined.

Glen Newhart:

Oh, well, I hope to be an astronaut. I don't think anybody as a child says, "I want to become a foundation director."

Japhet De Oliveira:

Yeah. Well, aren't both jobs impossible.

Glen Newhart:

They can be. And nobody says, well, I want to be a philanthropist as a child. Nobody knew what that was, but I think that was modeled for me as a child by my father and his involvement and nonprofit boards and things like that. Of course academy boards and things like that. But yeah, that was... And I totally lost the train of the thought on this one. I was asked this question again.

Japhet De Oliveira:

No, it's great. It's great. It's like how you imagine your life, it's going to be different.

Glen Newhart:

Yeah. Yeah. I always thought that I would do something in the business field that was always fascinating to me. And interestingly enough, healthcare was really not on my horizon. I was kind of happy working at Adventist institutions and then I went and worked at non Adventist institutions and at some point I just decided, you come to this fork in the road when you've done it so many years, you're like, "Okay, so I've done the private school thing. Do I go do higher education? Do I do healthcare?" And in that moment I thought higher education seems kind of easy. You have a built-in alumni base and nothing's easy of course. But I'm like, "Huh, what is the toughest thing we can do? Let's try to raise money from people that we are still sending bills to in healthcare." And how can we do this?

And so I've been very honored to have some significant mentors in my career that I could ask questions of and rely on. But surprisingly, everyone's experience is different. And so yeah, I thought I would end up on maybe the operation side of things, not in healthcare, but I think this is where I firmly believe that throughout every step of my career, God has opened the doors for me to walk through whether I wanted to or not in the moments I needed to be there.

Japhet De Oliveira:

That's good.

Glen Newhart:

I've always gravitated to places where I felt I could make a difference in where I was needed. If I could probably back in 2007 at an opportunity to go to a very large health system in Minnesota and they have me fly the whole family in and it was so great. And so we were going around and I was being toured around by the leader of this foundation and I said, "What do you need?" He said, "We don't need anything." I said, "What do you mean you don't need anything?" He's like, "Well, I have $140 million in the bank." I'm like, "Well, so what do we raising money for so we have more money?" And I'm like, "Okay, well, in some respects that sounds kind of fun and easy. Successful operations raise more money."

We see that at our top universities, Harvard Jail, I mean billions of dollars, but they can still raise hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Look at that's different. And then it was a little hospital who had applied for, I just thought it was interesting. And I thought Children's Hospital in Montana, and we finished our visit in Minnesota and everything look good. I'm like, "Okay, great. I can go there. This guy's going to retire in a couple years. I'm going to be his number two. I'll take over." My career could be set. I could really work here for probably 30 years and it wouldn't be that difficult or taxing, which in a way was not that appealing.

Japhet De Oliveira:

I was going to say.

Glen Newhart:

I won a challenge. And it's a little hospital in Montana called me. The CEO called me directly and said, "Hey, we saw your resume. And I said, you're really late." I'm like, "I'm literally coming off a visit at another health system." And he said, "We'd like to fly you out." And I said, "If you're going to do that, you literally have to do that this week." I think it was a Monday, Thursday, I flew into Montana. He picked me up at the airport, drove me to the hospital, I walked in the door and I instantly knew that I can make a difference there. I could feel that-

Japhet De Oliveira:

That's brilliant.

Glen Newhart:

... "Wait, I have skills they need and I can probably figure out a way to raise a lot of money here because they need it."

Japhet De Oliveira:

Yeah, they need it.

Glen Newhart:

And that was four and a half years. And that's where I met the gentleman with the apple pie. I met these fascinating people. It certainly wasn't easy. Montana then was 2007, 2008 starting then. It wasn't the wealthy trendy exile state for Californians that it is today. It was more salt of the earth types. But no, it was good. I felt needed. And so the Lord God has led me to the places that I should be. And in fact, same for here. I was sort of burned out with healthcare and I thought, I'm going to do something completely different. And so I was, took a job for the Vale Valley Foundation, and I'm leaving healthcare high pressure of a public healthcare district down south and with scandals that played out across the pages of the San Diego Union Tribune for years.

And we were still raising a lot of money for the hospital and doing great projects. And I thought, why am I doing this? This is kind of nuts. Will this ever change? And so I saw an opportunity, went to Vale. I'm like, okay, I'm going to do arts, athletics and education. I'm not sure how you raise money for World Cup downhill skiing. We had a performing arts center at Beaver Creek and all this stuff, but really interesting people, a great team. And then out of the blue, as the Lord often

Japhet De Oliveira:

Does.

Glen Newhart:

Yes, You get a call and I get this random seven oh seven phone number and like, "Hi, I am calling from Adventist Health, St. Helena, and you had applied for a job here and we have an opening in our foundation." And I said, "Oh, I'm so sorry. I think you're mistaken. I've not applied for a job." They said, "No, no, you did." And after a back and forth of a couple of minutes, "I assure you I did not apply for a job." And then I'm like, "Wait a minute. I think I did two or three years before." And I said, "Is this something I applied for a couple of years ago? But we want to talk to you now." And I'm like, "Oh, you have the worst timing in the world." And so after some conversation, as it often happens, they said, "We're really impressed with your background. And you're still in SoCal, aren't you?" I said, "no, actually, I'm in Vail, Colorado." And they're like, "Perfect." I'm like, "How is that perfect?" "Well, our CEO is going to be out there in a couple of weeks in the area and would like to have coffee with you." And I said, "Well, okay, it's coffee. It could meet an interesting guy. He probably doesn't... I'll get him a good cup of coffee and we'll have an interesting conversation and that'll be the end of it."

And he started to tell me about St. Helena Hospital. And the history of this place. And I'd known about it a little bit, of course, sort of growing up in the church. But I was fascinated by his description of the board members and how people were so invested in healthcare in the upper Napa Valley and keeping it here and the history and how it's grown. And he said, I always remember something he said. I said to him, I said, "Steve, you're expecting me to leave." As we were getting further in the conversation, I said, "Really? If this goes well, Steve, you're expecting me to leave a place I just arrived a couple months ago, six months ago. I'm not that guy." And he said, "Glen, my job is not to convince you to stay. My job is to convince you that you are needed more somewhere else." And he said, "I want you to do something. He said, I want you to come out and meet the board members. And I'm like, okay. Arranged that. Came out here, sat down with some of the board members. And I'm like, this is different, right? This is straight away different. These are people, these are people, none of whom are Adventist.

But they are so committed to what we do as an organization. They may not understand our mission statement like we do, but they live it as much as we do just in a different way.

And so fast forward here I am, but that was certainly the Lord leading me to where I needed to be in that moment. And I wondered, I'm like, "Why are we doing this?" I was getting paid to do first tracks at Vale and Beaver Creek with donors. It was fun. It was interesting on a different level without the pressures of healthcare and getting to meet some fascinating people and do things completely differently. But I think I was needed here. And then COVID hit and then-

Japhet De Oliveira:

The world changed.

Glen Newhart:

The world changed. And we did some really unique and amazing things here.

Japhet De Oliveira:

Yeah. Fantastic man. Fantastic. Sadly, we only have time for two more numbers. So where would you like to go with your last two numbers?

Glen Newhart:

Let's go with-

Japhet De Oliveira:

Not sadly, because it's been amazing, but yeah,

Glen Newhart:

Let's go with 44.

Japhet De Oliveira:

44. All right. Ooh, this is great. For you, what is something you're proud to have created?

Glen Newhart:

Proud to create? I don't create anything myself, but if I could like to talk about what we collectively created during COVID, this kind of leads right into the last question. So when I got here, the St. Helena Hospital Foundation had a plan to create mobile health. And this idea started before I got here, but it really hadn't really moved much forward. And so then COVID hit and we had this mobile health van that was on order at the time. Amazon was buying every Sprinter van that they could to launch their delivery service. And so it was delayed, delayed, delayed, delayed, delayed. COVID hit we were envisioning this to care for seniors in the upper Napa Valley and a board member and I, in a conversation where we were both properly in our backyards.

Interestingly enough, we said, "We just need to do something for the farm workers. They can't get tested, they can't, all these different things." And so we created our own COVID testing program out of thin air, not using the state's resources, but contracting with our own labs and providing these services where our mobile health team would literally go out into the middle of a vineyard during the course of a workday and provide testing for folks.

Japhet De Oliveira:

That's fantastic.

Glen Newhart:

And we did thousands and thousands of tests. And when the state was taking weeks to deliver results, we'd do it in a matter of days. They were using labs in the state of California. We contracted with the labs in Oregon and other states. And so we just did this. And then it morphed into what we did in St. Helena. And this is where it gets really interesting from an Adventist health perspective, I don't think this story has ever fully been told. When the vaccine became available, we had developed such a trust in partnership with Napa Valley Public Health that our county administrator at the time called me about two o'clock on a Friday afternoon and said, "Glen, now that the vaccine's available, Governor Newsom has challenged us to open all these vaccine sites. We can't do it. We don't have the resources. You all have built up this trust with the community. We need you to open a mass vaccine site." I said, "You realize I run the foundation. I'm not clinical at all.

He said, "No, no, no, but what you've done during COVID so far, we think you can do this." It was two o'clock on a Friday afternoon. I mean, not the time you're really taking on new business. So I called Dr. Herber immediately and I said, "Dr. H, County just called, what do you think?" He said, "I think we should do it." I said, "Really?" He said, "Yeah, I think you can do it." I'm like, "Oh, I can do it." He said, "The hospital we're we're completely overwhelmed like every hospital was." And so it was a Friday afternoon, I made one more call to a community partner and I said, "Hey, could we have your support? We are thinking about doing this." He said, "Absolutely. So it's Friday. On Tuesday afternoon, we opened a mass vaccine clinic in St. Helena at the time, which was a closed college, community college campus. And so everything was great for the first little bit. The county provided us vaccine. We were doing all the crazy tears that the state had through that first effort. I think I met and greeted the first 15,000 people in line because you couldn't get a vaccine if you weren't the right tier.

But what we decided early on, and this is where Avanis Health comes in, is that we were going to do the right thing. We're going to prioritize our farm workers. We looked Napa Valley, heavily agricultural, we all know it for the wine industry, but there's significant agricultural presence here that was not related to wine. And we looked at what was happening across the state and areas that were heavy agricultural were having disproportionate shares of COVID infection.

And so we looked at this, well, how are people traveling around? Well, it's nice that someone who's living on four acres somewhere in the middle of the woods wants a COVID vaccine, and they're older and they do qualify, but our team was worried about the 15 farm workers driving together to work in a van and what that would mean, not just from the virus, which we didn't understand. There's a lot of fear as we remember. And so we decided to prioritize. We opened that day, and the first person to receive her vaccine was... And I'll never forget this, her name was Nancy Batt and she's, I think an eighty-some year old woman who happens to volunteer at the hospital now. And she got her vaccine and she just happened to be the first person in line. And she came in and she said, "Glen, I feel fine. Can I volunteer?"

And I'm like, "Yes, you feel well enough to volunteer?" She said, "Absolutely." And she looked around and she said, "I was a project manager. I think you guys need a little help." And I'm like, "You're right. We do need a little help. Help us smooth this out. We didn't know what we were doing." And so over the very next couple of days, we recruited 150 medical and nonmedical volunteers, retired surgeons from around the country, people of high acclaim in the medical field that heard about this and said, "We want to come volunteer for you." And the vaccine flowed nice and well for a while. And then it stopped, and this is where Adventist Health comes in. So every day, about four o'clock, we'd run out a vaccine. And so my next call was to our county public health and say, "Dr. Alusio what do you have for me tomorrow?" It was just in time delivery. And she said, "I don't have anything for you. We're like, wait a minute. We're partners here. We can't give you a vaccine." And so after a frenzied call back to our pharmacy person who said, "Let me call Roseville." And so we started to piece together unused vaccine from different markets where there was vaccine hesitancy or something else.

And so they said, "Yeah, we can get you this, we can get you that." And so we started to piece it together and there were couriers that would bring it in so we could continue to do vaccine over a three-week stretch. We received not a single dose from county public health, but during that time, Adventist Health provided thousands of vaccines for That's amazing. This community. And it came from maybe a hundred doses here, a hundred doses there. And this is really a remarkable thing, and I'm sure we frustrated people at some point, right?

Japhet De Oliveira:

It's okay.

Glen Newhart:

We were just trying to keep going. And so in the end, in a town of 6,000 people, we distribute over 60,000 vaccines. We had this audacious goal that our community was going to be first to the term at the time was herd immunity. And through people in our community, supporters and people connected at the highest levels to even the vaccine manufacturers to kind of know what was going on. We can do this. Let's try this. Let's have this big crazy goal. Every one of those vaccine days, a hundred percent of the cost of this whole enterprise, there was no reimbursement from anybody. The government didn't pay a dime for this. All this was donated by our community. We figured out that it would cost about $5,000 a day to run a vaccine clinic all in. And so for a year and a half that we did vaccine, my office was at this college campus. We sat there, we were there available to people. It was the absolute best experience as a fundraiser I could have ever had.

Japhet De Oliveira:

Yeah, no kidding.

Glen Newhart:

Because I'm meeting everybody in the community, and I remember we do some system philanthropy calls and I was like, guys, if your hospital's doing vaccines, you need to be there. Why we should be at home. And I said, "Yes. Okay guys, look, we all know we're going to get the virus at some point and it is scary, but lets kind of be out there with the people that need us. And so to this day, did an event on Saturday night, people were coming up to me, "Hey, do you remember me from the vaccine clinic?" And I'm like, "Yes, you were one of our volunteers." And so this was this incredible moment where a community came together, but it would not have been possible without Adventist Health being our partner in this, our other health systems that we all know about in the area. They weren't doing this. We actually do what we say. That's why I'm so proud. My pet peeve in a way is we don't talk about it enough.

Japhet De Oliveira:

Well, I've heard the story. This is great.

Glen Newhart:

Yeah, we do amazing things as an organization. But as Adventists, I think we don't want to brag, but we actually do the things that other people say they do. So I'm so proud of what we do across our system. In my little way, I try to support my other, all the other foundations, I make donations to as much as I can. I think at this point I've made a donation to every other Adventist Health Foundation just because I want to support my colleagues. It's not at a large level, but I'm so proud of what we do together. Yes, individual communities, St. Helena is far different. An inner city hospital. We're the hospital in some ways that shouldn't exist. But when Ellen White arrived at this property, and I think of her every day as my office was her home for many years, and I have the same view out across this incredible valley J-Fed that she did probably as when I was looking at the timeline and Allele cottage during that time, she was likely finishing the manuscript for Steps to Christ. And she talked about seeing this place in her dream, and I can see why.

And in some ways, St. Helena hasn't changed very much, but this hospital would not exist without the philanthropy that supports it. Think of a town of 6,000 people that has been doing heart surgeries for nearly 50 years. Has been a center of innovation from the very beginning. It doesn't happen, but it's through this, our Adventist health connection, our Sisterhood of hospitals, working together, everything we do and truly living the mission. That's incredible. And people don't know how to describe it. One last story. Because we're probably out of time.

Japhet De Oliveira:

No, I love it. Go ahead.

Glen Newhart:

A couple of years ago... I like to do rounds of the hospital, not clinical rounds, but I like to walk around and I get a sense of what's going on. Very Sam Walton, right Management by walking around. I don't manage the hospital obviously, but I like to know what's going on. And so there was a lady in the Healing Garden. Which we have koi fish and it's beautiful space with a waterfall.

Very relaxing. And she was sitting there and she was alone and "Is everything okay? Are you lost?" And she started to tell me a story and she said, "I come back every year." I'm like, "Oh, you come back every year." I'm thinking this is going to be a story of loss and it's going to be quite sad. And she said, "In 2001, my husband had a cancer diagnosis and he was told he had six months to live." And this was at another hospital. And she said, "I brought him to St. Helena for a second opinion, and you gave me nearly 20 additional years with my husband."

Japhet De Oliveira:

Wow, okay.

Glen Newhart:

Not 20 bad years, 20 good years. And she said, "And we would treasure the times we would come to campus for treatment." I've never heard that before. I said, well, what do you mean? She said, "There's something different here from the second we set foot on this place, there's a different feeling." She didn't know how to describe it. You and I may know what it is. And she said, "But you gave me 20 good years, 20 years where we could enjoy each other. We knew what was coming. We knew what the ultimate outcome was, but we had 20 more years together as a family, and we had 20 years to say goodbye."

And I thought, wow, to have that time. It's pretty amazing. And she said, "And so every year now, I come back because I want to feel what I felt then." And I'm like, "What are you feeling?" She said, "I'm feeling a place of caring." She said, "I don't know how to describe it, but I step foot here on this campus and it feels different than any place I've ever been." She said, "I watch how your employees, how the employees here interact with each other. It's the little things. You genuinely care for each other. And as patients, we feel that now in some ways, that may be unique in certain ways to St. Helena, but I think it is unique overall to what we do at Adventist Health." We create that experience for folks, and that experience is part divine inspired and healing. I believe she was feeling something that she couldn't describe, but we know to be the presence of probably the Holy Spirit, and she couldn't describe it. And so it was just this wonderful moment and I said, "Can I do anything for you? Can I get you a coffee? Do you need water or anything?" She said, "No, I just want to sit here." She said, "I'm just kind of absorbing this."

She said, "This is not a place of sadness for me. This is a place of gratitude and happiness." She drove three hours to come and do that visit. And that's just remarkable for me. So I feel honored to do my part in my way to carry on this legacy and to share stories and create opportunities for people to be involved and continue this incredible legacy that started here so many years ago, a couple weeks, our 147th anniversary. I can tell you, Dr. Herber and I are already planning the 150th

Japhet De Oliveira:

I know be a cool thing.

Glen Newhart:

And we had a conversation this morning to say, "Okay, Dr. Herber, we really need to be thinking about what are the next 50 years going to look like for healthcare in the upper Napa Valley?" And I said, "You and I will be long gone, but people are counting on us." And so we started to dream what would this look like? What would it take? And I think that that Adventist Health has given us so much, so much of what Adventist Health, Adventist health care around the world started here. But it's this collaboration and it's this unique thing that we have become as a corporation where we support each other and we actually do the things we say we do.

Japhet De Oliveira:

Yes. That's beautiful. Glen, that is a fitting note to end on, and thank you for telling the extra stories. Absolutely brilliant. I love them. I love them. I really believe that actually by sharing stories, we actually are changed, and I have so much to think about. I have so much to think about. I think the legacy of belonging is something that actually is driven for the purpose of doing good and bringing the presence of God of love into people's lives. I mean, yeah. Well done. Thank you, Glen. Thank you so much.

Glen Newhart:

Thank you for having me.

Japhet De Oliveira:

Yeah, God bless you and all the work that you guys are doing, the good work. You're doing the great work and may continue to bless and help people. Thank you so much.

Narrator:

Thank you for joining us for The Story & Experience Podcast. We invite you to read, watch, and submit your story and experience at adventist.org/story. The Story & Experience Podcast was brought to you by Adventist Health through the Office of Culture.