Twelve years ago, Gayla Brockman was in the right place at the right time when she accepted the position of executive director of The Menorah Legacy Foundation. MLF had just been formed following the purchase of Menorah Medical Center by HCA, a for-profit health care company. Before she was hired, a few decisions had been made regarding the establishment of MLF — such as the creation of the name and a location for the office. Brockman was charged with the most important thing, transforming the organization from a supporting foundation of Menorah Medical Center to a foundation that supports programs that foster the delivery, quality or affordability of healthcare or healthcare-related social services and proactively improves health and wellness by fostering transformational change in individual or community behaviors.
“We had to create processes, criteria, protocols, policies,” said Brockman. “All those things were not in place and had to be developed.”
That was a huge task, but it became a job and a life that Brockman has loved for the past 12 years. Now she has decided to take on a new challenge as president and CEO of the Michael Reese Health Trust in Chicago. Her last day on the job at MLF was this week.
Brockman said MLF has come a long way in the past 12 years. The first big challenge was extracting the foundation’s money from the hospital, which was all intertwined with the other Health Midwest Hospitals. At the same time, she was establishing relationships with people associated with the monies.
“The beginning was building my relationships with the board, building my relationships with the living trustees and determining how they wanted to reform the funds that could no longer be spent at Menorah, which was quite a process,” Brockman said.
In order to reform some of these funds, a petition had to be presented to a judge and the attorney general of Missouri. That took three years in the largest cy pres petition — a request to use certain funds in a manner as near as possible to the original intent for which they were given — the state had ever seen.
All the while MLF was making grants.
“We tried to perform while transforming ourselves, making grants and trying to figure out what our focus areas were going to be and how to allocate funds to those areas. It took us several years to get to a definition for three different focus areas that we all could agree on and an allocation formula for how much goes to the Jewish community and how much to the general community.”
During that process, Brockman said some thought the money should be directed to health care dollars only while others felt funds should be spent in the Jewish community to address Jewish communal needs.
“We had to find a compromise that wasn’t perfect but one with which we could all live and we have done so very well,” Brockman said.
Brockman said the community’s initial response to the foundation was not all positive either.
“There were many people in the community who didn’t understand why we weren’t supporting the hospital. It took years before people understood that we were no longer affiliated with the hospital. I don’t think we helped ourselves in keeping the name Menorah in that respect, but I’m not sure we wouldn’t have kept the name. I think it’s very important to keep the history and remember who we are and where we came from.”
Over the years Brockman has made it a priority to build relationships with the funders and their families.
“They were like my family as well and I wanted to be loyal and uphold the legacy of what made us in the first place and I did become very, very, close to many of our founders, Bernard Brown being one of them. Gus Eisemann is another,” she said, adding she’s also become close with members of the Aks and Johl families.
Over the years MLF has also been a program incubator, starting such programs as:
Academie Lafayette Healthy Kiosk — Started in 2007 with an idea and a $55,180 grant by the Menorah Legacy Foundation in collaboration with Academie Lafayette, the goal was to instill healthy eating habits for the students at the school by building a fresh fruit cart, providing daily fresh fruit and creating a school-yard garden.
PE4Life — An innovative school-based physical education curriculum that used video games to foster daily exercise. Students had to walk, move or climb to play the games. While the schools saw impressive increases in physical fitness, they also saw dramatic decreases in out-of-school suspensions and increased academic scores. The Menorah Legacy Foundation researched PE4Life by traveling to Naperville, Illinois, to observe the program and then led the effort to encourage other area funders to support its implementation in Kansas City.
Coterie Theatre-Dramatic AIDs Education Project — A medical student and an actor/actress, one of each sex, tell their stories to middle school age students about how they got AIDS and/or a sexually transmitted disease and how their lives have changed because of it. The Menorah Legacy Foundation provided the project with a list of the questions students asked after the presentation finished, which demonstrated evidence of the impact the presentations had on the teens. That list is still being used.
Of the programs MLF launched, Brockman believes the Kansas City Beans&Greens Program™ made the biggest name in the greater community. Beans&Greens was founded in 2010 by the Menorah Legacy Foundation and Cultivate Kansas City. Now in its sixth year, Beans&Greens makes fresh, healthy food accessible and affordable to low-income families at area farmers markets. Over 40,000 SNAP participants, seniors and farmers have benefitted from the program.
“We’re certainly known locally and nationally for that, including the passing of Missouri Senate Bill 680 in 2014, often referred to as the Beans&Greens bill, which authorizes the expansion of the nutrition incentive across the state of Missouri. As a result, a collaborative effort being led by Mid-America Regional Council will expand the nutrition incentive to farmers markets and grocery stores across the state of Missouri and Kansas. And it will bring federal money into both states to do it, so it’s a very exciting future,” she said.
With the Menorah Legacy Foundation assets just under $20 million, Brockman said, “We’re a tiny foundation but we’ve had a big voice. We’re looked at in the Jewish community as a funding partner and as an innovative leader in the general community.”
Dr. Jeff Kramer, president of the MLF board of directors, sees Brockman as an innovative leader herself, who he said has been very instrumental in MLF’s successes over the years.
“She’s very passionate about healthy living and the changes in lifestyle that make a difference in terms of health. I’ve really never met anybody quite like her. She really believes in the Menorah Legacy Foundation’s mission. I think that’s why everything we’ve done has been successful. We’re sorry to lose her, but she has a very good opportunity and we hope she is very successful in Chicago.”
As Brockman leaves MLF, she will take with her the words of her good friend and former MLF president, the late Bernard Brown.
“It’s not fundraising, it’s friend-raising and it’s been exactly that to me in every part of the community. I have friends in the urban core of all socio-economic levels, I have friends in the Jewish community of all socio-economic levels. It’s just been an incredible experience watching people do fabulous work every day and being a part in some way of either bringing a resource to them, bringing a partner to them, or bringing an idea to them that will help make them more effective.”
