Howard Brown Health Center (HBHC) recently announced the formation of a volunteer nominating committee to identify its new board members. As announced at the end of last year, all old board members who were present at the controversial period when the agency allegedly mismanaged its money and lost the MACS grant to Northwestern will be gone by June of this year (half have already stepped down). Karma Israelsen, who became a member of the board after the period of mismanagement, was recently made board chair.
The volunteer nominating committee is to be headed by Ron Nunziato, a certified healthcare compliance officer who also served on Howard Brown's board from 1985 to 1992. His tenure included two years as president; he recently completed a term as the board chair of Vital Bridges after a decade of service. In addition to Nunziato, the committee members are: Lisa Kuhns, Ph.D., Howard Brown staff; Matt Neilson, current Howard Brown board member; Tom Klein, M.D., physician and partner in Klein, Slotten and French Medical Associates; Leslie Ramyk, executive director, Ravenswood Health Care Foundation; and Alicia Ozier, executive director, Taskforce Prevention Services.
Windy City Times spoke with Nunziato about the formation of the committee and what it was looking for in new board members.
Windy City Times: You're the chair of this committee. What kind of range are you looking for within this board?
Ron Nunziato: What we have done is talk to staff and to the current board chair and, obviously, [Executive Director] Jamal [Edwards] and, using the committee's impressions of what the organization needs to move forward, we've identified some key strengths, kind of prioritizing key strengths or experience that we're looking for. Specifically, we're looking for people with senior levels of healthcare operations, ability to do strategic planning, strategic vision, people with senior level of corporation and business experience and people that understand finance. Those are the key strengths that we're looking for, specific to an experience level.
And then, added to that, I think it's important that board members understand their role as a governing body. Getting that piece with an understanding of the fiduciary responsibility that a board member has, I think, rounds out the process for the first set of priorities.
Now there are some other things we're looking for. We want to make sure people have time to do this, and people have a passion to serve; that people have an understanding of non-profits and things like that.
WCT: Could you clarify what you mean by fiduciary responsibility—and these will be unpaid roles on the board?
RN: Yes. The fiduciary responsibility of a board member is to ensure the funds of the organizations are used appropriately as they were intended. There are some rules around—maybe guidance is a better word—of board members that you have to accept and it's a legal obligation; the board has a legal obligation regarding the management of the money and the property of the organization.
It's important for people to understand that because I don't know if people really understand the responsibility of a board. I think people's hearts are in the right place when they say they want to volunteer on a board and do whatever they need to help the organization move forward. But with that comes a serious responsibility and a responsibility that I have taken really seriously for the numbers of years that I was on Howard Brown's board, previous boards and then the Vital Bridges board.
WCT: Has this process been in place before at Howard Brown? You were on the Howard Brown board from 1985-1992 and you were board president at one point. Was there ever a process like this to bring board members on? What was the process like before?
RN; Well, I could tell you what the process was in the late '80s. I can tell you of several processes. In the beginning, when I was elected to the board, there was a membership of Howard Brown. If you were a volunteer, if you were a donor, if you were a staff member: you were actually considered a member and therefore you got to vote on a board. The board meeting that I was elected at was held in the auditorium of Illinois Masonic or Thorek Hospital, and it was crazy; it was a nightmare. Managing who could vote, who couldn't vote, a quorum of who could vote, who couldn't vote—and that's why boards have evolved to the current situation where a board elects the new board. And I think this process that we're doing now is very similar to what non-profit boards go through, with the exception of now the majority of the nominating committee are not people associated with the organization. And that I think was done by design.
In the beginning, when I was the president of the board in '91-'92, we had a board nominating committee, and there were generally three members from the board on that committee. And I would appoint two community members to that committee. I don't know what Howard Brown did after [that]. It seems to me that they moved away from having any community relations people in there but I really don't know.
I didn't stay involved in the board process or the nominating process, but I think it's important to know that, moving forward here in this process, we have six people that are serving and only two of them, one staff person and one board member, are currently involved with Howard Brown. You could say that I was involved, Tom Klein [who was, with his partner Ross Slotten, a co-medical director of HBHC when Nunziato was on the board] was involved, but those are arm's length involvements from a long time ago and we're really doing it as a sense of purpose to ensure that the organization moves forward, that the community at large sees that the organization is taking this seriously, and that it wasn't an internal process where there are four board members nominating and interviewing and selecting new board members.
WCT: To the best of your knowledge, this is the first time that Howard Brown has had this kind of process in place?
RN: I believe so.
WCT: How was the committee chosen?
RN: We talked about how many people we would want on the committee. We all agreed that a number of somewhere between six to eight would be manageable from a time perspective, in terms of getting people to meetings and things like that. And we started talking about the complexity of who might we want to serve, and we all believed that one staff person should be represented and one board members should be represented so that we have a flavor of the org as it is now.
And then we started talking about community leaders, people that were well respected, well rounded, had some drive toward wanting Howard Brown to move forward, and we started making lists of names of people that we thought would be beneficial to the process and then further looked at [if] there were people on the healthcare and funding side of the organization that also might want to be involved and ensure that the organization moves forward. And from that we came up with our list.
WCT: Has Leslie Ramyk had a previous association with HBHC?
RN: I believe that Ravenswood Health Center are funders of the organization.
WCT: With regard to the committee, it does seem that most of the people have had some experience with the Howard Brown. [Note: At first, Nunziato thought, though he was clear that we would need to confirm, that Alicia Ozier's organization might be a funder of HBHC, but that has turned out to not be the case.]
RN: I think it would be irresponsible for the board to appoint a committee of someone that had no association with the organization.
WCT: Why is that?
RN: Because you're asking people to select people for the board and overwhelming responsibility especially given this time, and you have no association with this person to know what their interests may or may not be.
WCT: But what if you were to choose someone, say, from another healthcare foundation or organization that is invested in healthcare, they can still be invested in the well-being of a healthcare org without being funders [or connected previously to HBHC]. I'm asking especially about funders becoming responsible for new leaders. It seems a little bit complicated.
RN: Well, these are community organizations and community funders that have a vested interest in ensuring the organization moves forward and I think they're unbiased, serious leaders in their respective professions, to get this job done and move forward and in a a coordinated way. What I think we were looking for was: We have a little bit of the HBHC staff, one person from the board, we have two people, Tom Klein and myself, that are community leaders; myself, who has been on the organization's board but many, many years ago. We were looking for a well-rounded approach to representing the community.
WCT: There are to be 16-18 members on the board. Is that standard?
RN: I think for the size of the organization and for the budget it carries, 16-18 is an average size.
WCT: What about community ties? Would you take anyone who has had no overt kind of non-profit connection but is, for instance, a patient?
RN: We're looking at key priorities and then another set specific to experience and then another set key to priorities with regard to the type of person's time commitment, passion to serve, etc. There's also a criterion that we would like people that utilize the services of HBHC to be represented on the board.
[Note: According to the U.S Department of Health and Human Services, this last item is, in fact a requirement, not a choice: "One of the cornerstones of the FQHC program is community involvement in both the management and governance of the health center. The FQHCs must be governed by a community-based Board of Directors, a majority of whom are users of the health center's services and who represent the health center's service area in terms of demographic factors such as race, ethnicity and gender." According to the Rural Assistance Center, "The board must include a majority (at least 51%) of active, registered clients of the health center who are representative of the populations served by the center."]
Next week, look for an interview with Jamal Edwards about HBHC's next steps, salary issues and the new board.
