Barbara Newhouse
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Relationships Matter in Leadership
Barbara Newhouse was only four years
old when her father, Alfred, survived a terrible car
accident, but she remembers vividly the
tremendous shock wave of the incident that would
change her family forever. He would never be
able to work again, and he was plagued with
violent outbursts that resulted from a serious brain
injury.
With twelve children to feed and constant
caregiving needed, Barb’s mother found she
needed help with the cost of the medication that
helped to mitigate the outbursts, so she
went to the Department of Health
Services for assistance.
“I’ll never
forget seeing a man there who was like
a god to me, who said our family made
99 cents too much to qualify for
assistance with the cost of the
medication,” Barb recalls. “For our
family, that meant we needed to make a
choice. We could either pay for the
medications, or have food on the table.
If we didn’t pay for the medication, we
ran the risk of having violence in the
house.”
Growing up on a farm just north of a small
Iowa town and in a complicated blended family
situation that sometimes meant her mother was
caring for twelve children in addition to her
disabled husband, Barb became involved in the
caregiving of her father by the age of five, helping
him relearn how to do even the most basic tasks.
“My mom was my hero because she never missed
a beat,” Barb recalls. “She’d go to work at 11 at
night as a nurse’s aide until 7 AM and come home
to make sure us kids did our chores, had breakfast,
and got on the school bus. She made sure dad was
bathed and taken care of and that we all had
dinner. She had a hard life, and she’s an angel that
stays with me.”
Barb may have been young at the time, but
she knew in her heart there was something deeply
wrong with a system that would force a family to
choose between food and medicine. Yet watching
her mom work such grueling hours, she doesn’t
believe in entitlement, either. “If you can work,
you should work, but there are times when bad
things happen to good, hardworking people, and
we need systems in place to make sure those
situations can be handled well,” she remarks
today. “That’s why I grew passionate about
systemic change. I knew early on that everything I
did, starting with my first job at age fourteen
washing dishes at a local restaurant, would be
about saying, ‘There’s got to be a better way to do
this.’” Now the CEO of the MidAtlantic Region of the Arthritis
Foundation, her life’s work continues to
look at those systems through which we
handle our world and one another as
people, to find and enact that better
way.
Systemic change often begins
with awareness followed by education,
and the Arthritis Foundation is
committed to dispelling common
misconceptions around the condition.
“It has to do with inflammation of the
joints, but it actually includes over a
hundred different diseases,” Barb explains.
“People often believe arthritis is simply a condition
of age, yet two-thirds of the arthritis patients are
under the age of 65, and some 300,000 children
across the country are diagnosed with juvenile
arthritis each year.”
The Arthritis Foundation’s mid-Atlantic
region includes Delaware, Maryland, DC, Virginia,
and North and South Carolina, and its goals are
aligned with the organization’s nine other regions
and its national office. Preaching the motto,
“motion is lotion,” Barb and her team aim to
provide good exercise opportunities for people
with arthritis by teaching proper techniques for
aquatics, tai chi, and other sports. They work with
partners to combat obesity, which puts significant
pressure on joints. They also closely monitor
research breakthroughs across diseases.
“A
breakthrough in any one disease is tremendously
Barbara Newhouse
helpful in others,” she affirms.
Beyond these considerations, the Arthritis
Foundation focuses on strong legislative advocacy.
With 40 employees and a budget between $6 and
$7 million, the Mid-Atlantic region also has a $23
million endowment that has allowed them to fund
special projects for their national office. A few
years ago, they decided to give the national
organization additional funds to kick off an
osteoarthritis biomarker initiative with the
National Institutes of Health, and today, they’re
investing in the creation of a consumer
engagement initiative across the country that will
connect the public with professional advice and
information in new, immediate, and innovative
ways.
Leading systemic change in this way takes
a balance between strength and gentleness that
Barb has come to understand and embody through
the menagerie of experiences she began
accumulating through watching her mother. “My
mother wore the same perfume every single day
that I can remember,” she says. “She possessed a
gentle spirit and a great strength that she passed
on to me, and both have been absolutely vital
along my path through life.”
While they first came in handy in
assuming caregiving responsibilities for her father,
strength and grace helped Barb even more in
school, where she found herself labeled neither
beautiful nor well-off. “I was always the girl from
the wrong side of the tracks because we were so
poor,” she recalls. Yet Barb was set apart from her
peers in other, more substantive ways.
In
kindergarten, she was the only friend of a young
boy named Chris, a boy with Down Syndrome
who nobody else took the time to talk to. Her fifth
grade teacher, Ms. Halibut, took a particularly
strong interest in her, teaching her that inward
beauty is far more important than outward beauty.
When Barb wasn’t caring for her father,
mowing the lawn, or doing other chores, she was
an avid reader, which helped to fine-tune her
visionary mind. After working as a dish washer in
a restaurant and watching her mother work
tirelessly for minimal pay in caregiving, she knew
she wanted more from her life and resolved to go
to college and find a way to address the broken
systems she had witnessed through her short life.
“My mom hadn’t finished high school, and
because of that, it was important to her that we
had the opportunity to pursue college,” she
remarks. “She would talk to us about not putting
ourselves in a position where we had to settle.”
With that, Barb went on to attend a small
Catholic college in Iowa called Briar Cliff with a
little help from a state tuition grant. To cover the
rest of the cost and her expenses, she checked
groceries and worked in the school’s financial aid
office. Overall the experience was good, but she
never forgot the day one of the Deans at the
college told her she would never have the success
she wanted because she didn’t have what it took.
“He never defined ‘what it took,’ but if I was
determined to make something of myself already,
that comment just lit another fire under me,” she
said. “He was going to be dead wrong.”
When she first got to college, Barb thought
she wanted to go into social work where she’d
interact one-on-one with individuals, but she
quickly realized she didn’t have the temperament
for that when she interned at a night hotline at a
YMCA. A man named Tom would call every time
she worked, saying he drank too much and was
going to commit suicide. One night, eager get to
the root of the systemic problem, Barb broke from
the hotline’s protocol and actually called him out
on his bluff, essentially challenging him to break
from his cycle of empty threats and instead do
something to actually change his life for the better.
At a hockey game years later, Barb and her
husband actually ran into Tom, who had gotten
help for his drinking and had found his niche as a
telemarketer. “He told us he was alive because of
me,” she remembers. “I felt great about that, but I
think it’s good that he was my first and last social
work case.”
Indeed, Barb’s manager at the hotline
recognized that she would be better in addressing
systems, which helped shift Barb in a new
direction. With that in mind, when she graduated
from college in only three years, she accepted a
position running an alternative sentencing
program for minor offenders under the scope of a
Voluntary Action Center. “In the early 1980s, there
was a big push to refocus minor offenders through
volunteer work, and these centers popped up all
over the country to match them with volunteer
jobs,” she recounts.
That center was acquired by United Way,
and suddenly, Barb found herself 20 years old,
working for United Way, and attending her first
board meeting. Afterward, her boss, a woman,
called her into her office and instructed her to wear
Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area
a blazer to all board meetings going forward
because she was too distracting.
After the
following month’s board meeting, she was
instructed that she was no longer allowed to smile
in the meetings, as that was too distracting.
Shortly thereafter, her boss called her in and fired
her.
When Barb got fired that day, a man
named Joe, who was the labor liaison between the
unions and United Way, knew that Barb’s boss had
just made a huge mistake. IBP, a major meat
packing company in the area, had just gone on
strike, and all of the union business agents decided
that Barb would be their poster child. “They filed
an action with the NLRB in DC on my behalf,” she
remembers. “Being so young and not really
understanding what was going on around me, I
was a pawn in their bigger game. There was all
this media attention on me, but I was just worried
about how I was going to pay my bills!”
Thankfully, Barb went to work for the JC
Penney Company running the switchboard until
she was suddenly reinstated in her former job,
with both sides of the scuffle safely in mediation.
Finally with enough stability to learn and grow,
she
found
she
excelled
at
marketing,
communications, and fundraising, staffing the
organization’s chairman as they waited for a new
executive to come onboard and learning more
about nonprofit leadership in the process.
After this experience, she decided to try
her skills out in the “for profit” world, becoming a
mall marketing director for a couple years. In that
role she was charged with working with vendors
on marketing plans that would bring people into
their shops. The challenge was, however, that
bringing people into the shops didn’t always
equate to a sale. “It felt like it was compromising
my values,” she remembers. “It felt empty and
wrong to me, and I knew I wanted to go back into
the nonprofit space.”
With that, Barb decided to take a position
with the American Cancer Society, which took her
to California, where her family had lived briefly
before moving to Iowa. She then transitioned over
to the Alzheimer’s Association, where she spent 16
years developing an incredibly
nuanced
understanding of systems change and the
ramifications for capacity building for nonprofits.
Much of that time was spent in Chicago, working
as a change agent at the national level. It was
during this time that, at a wedding, she happened
to run into the old dean who had told her she’d
never been successful. “He apologized for saying
that to me,” she remembers, “and I told him I
hoped he had learned that it was never okay to say
something like that to a young person.”
At the Alzheimer’s Association, Barb
facilitated a strategic plan, oversaw nonprofit
mergers, and ended that period of her professional
life as a VP of Field Relations before accepting the
position of COO of the Autism Society.
Ultimately, however, she came across the
opportunity at the Arthritis Foundation and knew
it was a place where she could promote the kind of
systemic change she had been oriented toward all
her life. “I was attracted by the fact that I’d be able
to create a new organizational culture for the MidAtlantic Region,” she explains. “I came in and
ripped the Band-Aid off right away, getting rid of
all the chapters and instituting a matrix
management system. We now have our CFO in
Richmond, our COO in Charlotte, and three Senior
Vice Presidents covering fundraising, mission, and
communications in Bethesda and Charlotte. It’s
truly a matrix system that prevents haves and
have-nots. The region has a single revenue budget
and a single expense budget, and that has created a
new sense of cohesion and unity.”
Through her extensive career, Barb’s
efforts have never been about making money. “It’s
been about supporting my family and surrounding
myself with the people who will allow me to live
the life I want to live and teach my son the values I
grew up with,” she affirms. Her efforts have also
been about giving back to the people and causes
that fill her with passion, and that began with
giving back to her mother. After so many years of
struggle and caregiving, Alfred passed away, and
Barb and her siblings pulled together to make sure
their mother had the kind of life she had so clearly
earned. They convinced her to move into a lowincome independent living setting and invested
the money from the sale of the house so she could
rely on that for her ordinary needs. “Anything
beyond those ordinary needs that was more about
fun, we gave her,” Barb says. “We were able to
pay for her to go to Hawaii, for instance. But she
was always most excited about simply going to the
grocery store and getting the things she could
never have before. It was wonderful for us to be
able to pay her back in that way because we knew
that, if she had had the opportunities gave us, she
would have been one successful lady. She had a
Barbara Newhouse
true hidden savvy.”
Just as important as paying it back,
however, is paying it forward. On a broader scale,
this has meant serving on a number of Chamber of
Commerce boards, which earned her the Bethesda
Chevy Chase Chamber’s chairman’s leadership
award. On an individual scale, however, this has
meant helping people along the way. One of
Barb’s employees, Alpha, used to hand out
newspapers every morning at the Bethesda metro
stop. Barb would always politely decline but say
hello nonetheless, and one day, he asked if he
could give her his resume. She read it on the train,
and it turned out he had a solid skill set for an
open position in their finance department. Alpha
was born in Senegal and attended college in
Minnesota, and today, he has his permanent green
card and is poised to take his citizenship exam,
and his job at the Foundation played a
considerable role in getting to this point.
As well, Barb recently drove down to
Atlanta to meet with a young lady who was out of
work, ultimately getting her a position working on
a project. “In both instances, I was asked what
they could do to repay me,” Barb says. “But I just
said, this is about paying it forward. Someday
down the road, you’ll meet someone who needs
help in a way you needed help. This is how our
efforts to improve lives can echo on forever, long
after we’re gone.”
In advising young people entering the
working world today, Barb reminds us that not
everything is a given. “Even if you’re smart, you
still have a lot to learn, so don’t expect to walk into
a job and start at the top,” she says. “You need to
earn things. Young people come in with a very
unrealistic view of the work environment, feeling
they should walk in with a certain salary and title.
Don’t tell your boss how good you are; just be that
good. Because if you have to tell me how good
you are, you probably aren’t as good as you think
you are.”
This is an integral tenet not only to
followership, but also to leadership, and Barb
herself was given this advice by a CEO when she
was trying to find her footing as a leader.
Growing up with a fierce independence and self-
reliance, she used to approach leadership thinking
she always had to be the one pulling the whole
cart herself. In time, she thought it might be better
to try pushing the cart instead, but soon realized
that that was more about managing direction than
leading.
“That’s when I learned that good
leadership is really about relying on one another,”
she said. “It’s about getting out front and being
that good, which attracts other good people to join
you and share the weight. Leadership is not about
telling people what to do; it’s about providing a
vision and a framework in which people can
succeed.”
With her finger consistently to the pulse of
systemic change, measuring how far we’ve come
as a society and how far we have to go, Barb’s
leadership is really about creating a framework in
which all people can succeed, including the
homeless people she sees on the street. “That
could be anyone,” she says. “It could have been
me, but I had a mother who wasn’t going to let
that happen. That is a gift I strive to pay forward
every day. I do what I do because I believe that
somebody has to be looking at doing the right
thing for people, and through broad systemic
change, we can maximize the scale of that sacred
effort.”
© July 2013 Gordon J. Bernhardt.
reserved. Reprinted by permission.
All rights
 By Gordon J. Bernhardt, CPA, PFS, CFP®, AIF®
About Gordon J. Bernhardt
President and founder of Bernhardt Wealth
Management and author of Profiles in Success:
Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the
Washington D.C. Area, Gordon provides financial
planning and wealth management services to affluent
individuals, families and business-owners throughout
the Washington, DC area. Since establishing his firm
in 1994, he and his team have been focused on
providing high-quality service and independent
financial advice to help clients make informed decisions
about their money. For more information, visit
www.BernhardtWealth.com and Gordon’s Blog.
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Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area