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 Mid-Atlantic 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 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 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 Mid-Atlantic 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 low-income 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
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.”
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