If you had $3 million to devote to improving the health of vulnerable citizens of San Diego and Imperial County each year, what would you fund?
Would you bring children in an asthma-inducing area of Imperial County indoors to play — and use the space to teach parents seeking re-unification with their children how to play with their kids? Would you mobilize San Diego’s college students to care for and feed the homeless? Or expose high-risk youth from the urban core to outdoor sports like surfing and snowboarding?
In this month’s Pulse podcast, executive director of Alliance Healthcare Foundation (AHF) Nancy Sasaki shares how she and the board of AHF select their annual grant recipients, and details how she came to lead the organization.
A beloved middle-school science teacher inspired Sasaki to dedicate her life to health care management, a field in which she says “learning never stops.”
Where did she gain the business acumen she needed to run a foundation with a $74 million endowment? “I attended classes and workshops,” Sasaki explains. “And then I was hired to conduct the turnaround of a Planned Parenthood in Hawaii with the largest debt of any such affiliate at the time.”
Four-and-a-half years ago, Sasaki joined Alliance, which she says often awards grants to organizations run by demonstrated leaders, “folks who never take ‘no’ for an answer and are always looking for innovative solutions to the problems they are trying to solve.”
Hear more about how leaders are cultivated in healthcare on this month’s podcast, What Would You Fund With $3 million?
To listen to previous episodes of the Pulse, visit our archives page on UCTV’s Career Channel.