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Bill Klaproth (Host): At Pullman Regional Hospital, generosity is part of the culture with their Generosity Inspires program. So what is it and how does it benefit the community? Let’s find out with Megan Guido, the Chief Marketing and Community Relations Officer and a member of the Generosity Inspires Committee at Pullman Regional Hospital. Megan, thank you so much for your time. So let’s start with this, what is Generosity Inspires at Pullman Regional Hospital?

Megan Guido (Guest): Bill, thanks for asking. It is really a special thing at Pullman Regional and it’s what we call a program, but it’s also a huge part of our culture, and we call it a cultural imperative, which just means we try to embrace the power of generosity and its transformative energy every day in terms of what we do as an organization and taking care of people. Healthcare workers, if you think about it, taking care of people is really the ultimate form of generosity, when you’re taking care of people at their most vulnerable time. Healthcare workers tend to kind of downplay that and just say it’s just part of my job, but we want to highlight it and let people know how giving and being generous can really change the culture of an organization and the community.

Host: Yeah, that makes sense. So let’s talk about the culture, how did you work the Generosity Inspires program into the culture of Pullman Regional Hospital?

Megan: Sure, so we were really inspired by a women named LeAnn Keiser Carlson, who is one of the founding members of the Keiser Institute, and she talks about generosity as part of organization’s culture, particularly in hospitals and healthcare, and it also is just kind of a natural reflection of our culture and some of the values that we at Pullman Regional have, and things like flexibility and personal growth and serving others, when you think about those traits you may say, well what does that have to do with generosity, but a key mantra that the hospital and employees follow is that personal change precedes organizational change. We have to understand ourselves first and work on our own personal growth before we can expect to change an organization, so the very fact that we embrace that philosophy and we give people a chance to grow through leadership opportunities by helping the community through time volunteering and making the community better, we believe that can be a very powerful value and expressed through helping the community.

Host: So you just mentioned time volunteering. Do you have other examples of generosity and how they’re shown in the hospital and the community?

Megan: Absolutely. We have employees that are helping the community in a variety of years, whether it’s 30 years working for the Boy Scouts organization or it’s teaching Thai Chi as a physical therapist or an occupational therapist to the community and doing that for free and saying pay it forward, you don’t have to pay, you can help another organization and make the community that much stronger. We have examples of an ad all over, and part of what we’re doing is telling those stories through a special campaign this summer and throughout the year and we’re going to be posting those on our website, and people love to hear how people are giving back to the community and being generous.

Host: Megan, you had a great quote earlier. I wrote it down, I liked it so much. “Personal change precedes organizational change.” Really puts that in perspective. So tell us why is generosity so important to the hospital, as an organization and to the community.

Megan: Sure, that personal change precedes organizational change, really a key to who we are as an organization. We need to work on ourselves and be comfortable with who we are in order to give to our patients every day, and part of that is finding work/life balance and giving back to our community, so again you can see how generosity kind of weaves through that. There are so many challenges Bill, that come with being a small, critical access nonprofit hospital in a rural area. We believe that generosity is really going to be the engine that fuels our future. You know, whether that’s coming from providers and staff who continue to give us the five start quality care that we do, whether it’s through our donors who support us philanthropically or the public in terms of continuing public support as a nonprofit hospital, public district hospital, and it’s also going to be through partnerships that we have with entities like Washington State University. So you can see the power of generosity, and how it’s going to be really part of our future going forward.

Host: Absolutely, this has been fascinating Megan, and I love the whole Generosity Inspires mantra. I think it’s really important and thank you for your time. For more information on Generosity Inspires, visit pullmanregional.org, that’s pullmanregional.org and be sure to subscribe to the health podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts, and if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels. This is the health podcast from Pullman Regional. I’m Bill Klaproth, thanks for listening.