Worcester Business Journal

wbjournal.com | August 21, 2023 | Worcester Business Journal 21 e value of nonprofit board service V I E W P O I N T E D I T O R I A L W hen businesses are looking for new ways to grow, an effective strategy is to help a local nonprofits. Empowering nonprofits to rise en- ables a whole community to do the same. According to the National Council of Nonprofits, these organizations spend $2 trillion annually and ignite further economic expansion. Just think about the local youth sports leagues, museums, perform- ing arts, and educational organi- zations that attract visitors, bring together families, spur spending on restaurants and attractions, improve quality of life, and entice people to rent, purchase a home, or start a business. Nonprofit support floats all boats. In the aermath of COVID, nonprofits don't just need sponsors. Some need a restart they can only achieve with new board members. Many nonprofits, especially smaller ones, depend on working boards to advance their missions. Beginning with incorporation, they require oversight, governance, fundraising, and a myriad of critical initiatives. During the pandemic, their pipeline of potential board members shrank, and they're still catch- ing up. Local professionals are a vital source of expertise. My law firm, Bowditch & Dewey, feels so strongly about this, the firm helped launch a Nonprofit Board Matching Program for the Foundation for MetroWest. rough surveys, the foundation had discovered its nonprofit partners' No. 1 need – outside of money – was board members. Many of our attorneys were eager to join nonprofit boards, but didn't know how to find ones aligning with their values and skills. As long-time foundation sponsors, this launch was the most impactful chapter in the relationship thus far. Businesses benefit from board roles at least as much as nonprofits do: • Recruitment and retention: Businesses demonstrate they care about employees' growth and fulfillment. at is a powerful way to draw and keep talent. • Professional development: Rolling up their sleeves on a board introduces team members to new approaches and ideas from others. • Expanding networks: ere is no better way for rising stars to build their book of business than to grow their professional networks. Board memberships enable them to demonstrate their expertise and build trust. • Capstone on a distinguished career: Successful leaders, too, gain satisfaction from giving back. • Exposure to a diversity of backgrounds and ideas: Creativity is central to effective business problem solving, and teaming with people with diverse backgrounds fosters that quality. • Opportunities to enlarge their communities, and make friends, with others who want to have an impact. Indeed, board membership is a quadruple win, for individuals, businesses, nonprofits, and communities. Katherine Garrahan, a partner at Worcester law firm Bowditch & Dewey, is a real estate attorney focused on helping nonprofit, commercial, and institutional clients in Central and MetroWest Massachusetts. Contact her at kgarrahan@bowditch.com. BY KATHERINE GARRAHAN Special to WBJ A T H O U SA N D WO R D S B Y R A M Ó N L . S A N D O V A L Maternity needs more than an angry coalition Katherine Garrahan I n the three-month battle over UMass Memori- al Health's plan to close its maternity center at its affiliate HealthAlliance-Clinton Hospital in Leominster, it's easy for the coalition of com- munity leaders and politicians to paint UMass Memorial as the big bad heartless business. As the larg- est employer in Central Massachusetts with more than 16,000 employees and $3.1 billion in annual revenue, the nonprofit healthcare provider can be a so target. Advocating for maternity care is no doubt a winning political issue, and it's easy to see why so many from northern Worcester County are rallying around it. But simply forcing UMass Memorial's hand to keep the center open isn't the answer either. Our healthcare system, from national to local, is falling apart. e Family Health Center of Worcester was mere hours away from having to close permanently last year, before its financial ship was righted with a significant influx of state funding. Heywood Healthcare paused an expansion plan in Gardner this year in order to get its finances in line. Tenet Healthcare has had a high level of turnover on its executive team at MetroWest Medi- cal Center in Framingham. ese are all signs of major cracks in the industry. We need a strong coalition of business, community, and political leaders to tackle the many problems causing this threatening level of strain. UMass Memorial insists the Leominster materni- ty closure is a clinical decision, not a financial one. As WBJ Correspondent Emily Micucci writes in her "e high cost of delivering babies" story on page 12, the Leominster unit is operating with essentially one OB-GYN on staff, doesn't have a neonatal intensive care unit, and has limited capacity to deal with labor emergencies. UMass Memorial could do what Tenet did at MetroWest Medical Center to improve its maternity center: hire and train more nurses in labor and delivery, and bring on laborists, who are doctors who only handle deliveries. All that doesn't make much sense in Leominster, though, as the number of births at the hospital fell 24.6% between fiscal 2018 and 2022. Staffing up the Leominster maternity unit would also be a challenging financial investment, as the center already operates at a $4-million annual loss. Arguably UMass Memorial could absorb that loss, as the system generated $293 million in positive operating margin over the six months ending in March. However, UMass shouldn't look to increase its burden at a time when nearly all hospitals are waving warning flags about federal funding cuts coming in October. Operating large healthcare systems is always going to be a balancing act of providing thin-margin or money-losing operations like maternity and pediatrics alongside those with larger margins like cardiology and neurology. Another growing problem for systems like UMass Memorial is private, for-profit operations running competing, streamlined operations for many of those high-margin specialties, like a colonoscopy center. We're not that far off from a future where the for-profit providers have all the high-margin businesses while nonprofits like UMass are le to skate by focusing on low-margin, essential services. e Department of Public Health is right in desig- nating Leominster maternity as an essential service and UMass Memorial needs to develop a plan to service the marginalized populations to be impacted by the consol- idation of maternity services to Worcester. Beyond this single issue, we need to provide some comprehensive, consistent fixes over many decades to return health care as the essential service it is. The above Editorial is the opinion of the WBJ Editorial Board. The Viewpoint column, the A Thousand Words cartoon, and the Word from the Web commentary represent the opinions of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of WBJ or its staff. WBJ welcomes letters to the editor and commentary submissions. Send them to bkane@wbjournal.com. W W

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