Des is a Seattle native, but travelled to the Southwest to attend

Prescott College in Arizona, an experimental college that sprang out of

the tumult of the 1960s. His orientation involved being dropped off in a
remote area of the Navajo Reservation with ten other students to
spend three weeks backpacking and kayaking through the canyons of
Arizona and Utah. “It was an eye opener to travel through remote
Navajo country and meet people herding sheep on horseback, living in
remote hogans without electricity, and travelling by wagon,” he said.
The experience gave him a respect for diverse people and cultures,
and helped point him toward a degree in Anthropology.

Returning to the Pacific Northwest, Des got a nursing degree from the
University of Washington, putting it to use working on the birthing unit
of the Fort Defiance Indian Hospital on the Navajo Reservation. “It was
a great experience,” Des said. “Midwives attended the deliveries and
they convinced me to go to the University of Utah to become a
midwife. The federal government paid for graduate school; in return, I
promised to spend three years anywhere they chose.” They sent him
to South Dakota’s Rosebud Sioux health center. He drove a Winnebago
fitted out as a mobile prenatal clinic on a regular route through small
reservation communities, delivering babies in the tiny local hospital
and transporting anything they could not safely handle 200 miles to
the nearest obstetrician, usually by small plane. It was there he met
and married fellow midwife, Rebecca, with whom he has two sons.

Moving to Everett, Des ran the maternity program at General Hospital

Medical Center which had been started to improve access to prenatal
care for low-income women. Five years later he became Executive
Director of the Community Health Center of Snohomish County, at a
time when the State’s 22 community health centers were all struggling
for survival. “We all decided,” Des recounted, “that our future was to
learn to work effectively together.” They established the Community
Health Plan of Washington (of which Des later became Chair), which
today serves 225,000 people. “To do this,” he said, “each health center
had to contribute $2000 in the first year and $50,000 in the second
year, amounts which were painful to organizations struggling to make
payroll.” But the decision to work jointly and in an entrepreneurial spirit
launched incredible growth in Washington’s health center movement.

For the last few years, Des has been a consultant in non-profit health,
providing strategic planning guidance, facilitation, and project and
interim management services. In this role, he has worked with
community and tribal health centers, foundations, and public health
agencies. “I enjoy consulting,” he noted, “but I miss growing an
organization. The opportunity to be part of Interfaith, as it builds

1 of 2
capacity to increase the years of healthy life and eliminate health
disparities in the communities and people served, is exciting to me.”

In working with Interfaith, Des lists his values as:

• Our focus is on the health of populations.
• We are accountable for outcomes.
• Our strategies are evidence based.
• We seek elegant and efficient solutions.
• We work at the intersection of business, nonprofit and
government sectors to achieve solutions in the common interest.

These are challenging times, as Des describes elsewhere in this

newsletter. Des asserts, “I’m glad to be at the helm of this vibrant
organization as we cope with challenges and grow from good to great. I
have felt welcomed in my first days here and am impressed by the
progress that Interfaith has made in serving the Whatcom County
Community.

2 of 2