Roby Brock: I’m Roby Brock. Welcome to this edition of the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal Report. Well, Arkansas Children’s Hospital, right before the end of the year, received news that it would get a $50 million gift, the largest in its history from the B Thomas Golisano Foundation. He is the founder of Paychex, and he’s made a lot of investments in children’s health and children’s hospitals across the country. As a matter of fact, he’s building a network of children’s hospitals that will benefit from his charity.
I sit down today with Marcy Doderer, CEO of Arkansas Children’s, to find out how this gift came to pass and what she plans to do with it. That’s Marcy Doderer, CEO of the Arkansas Children’s Hospital on today’s Northwest Arkansas Business Journal report… Joining me now, Marcy Doderer. She’s the CEO of Arkansas Children’s. Good to always visit with you, Marcy. Happy New Year.
Marcy Doderer: Happy New Year to you. Roby, we’re really excited to talk with you today.
Brock: You are gonna have a happy New Year with this historic $50 million gift that has been bestowed upon Arkansas Children’s. Tell me the background of where this gift is coming from and how it came about. I’m curious to see how that conversation gets started.
Doderer: Well, we are truly honored, excited. Just blessed to be the recipient of 50 million dollars from a remarkable businessman and philanthropist, Mr. Thomas Golisano. He’s best known for founding and launching Paychex, one of the largest companies supporting HR and payroll efforts for medium and small businesses in our country.
And he personally, through a letter, reached out to Arkansas Children’s back in the very early summer and he reached out to a number of children’s hospitals at that time across the country with a letter offering to engage in a conversation about the work we do, the opportunity for him to potentially make a significant transformative gift if he were to find our work admirable of earning such a gift. And that’s how it started, literally a letter, a real letter in my mailbox at work.
So I know it’s hard to believe that, right? So I worked with our chief development officer, Fred Scarborough, who reached out to the Golisano Foundation and started the conversation. And as this kind of thing does take a bit of time, it’s gone on from June till now, but we sent them a lot of information about Arkansas Children’s and what we do across the state. Fred actually had an opportunity to visit the foundation there in Rochester, New York, and then a member, his executive director of the Golisano foundation came to Arkansas in November and spent a couple of days with us. Visiting with team members, touring our campus here in Little Rock, understanding what we do both in treating sick and injured kids, but also the impact we’re having more broadly in the community of child health. And then we were invited to sit with Mr. Golisano in person just a couple of weeks ago on Dec. 16, and he decided that we are worthy of a major gift. And so we’ve made the announcement today of a 50 million dollar gift from Mr. Golisano.
Brock: Well, congratulations. Now, I want you to be really honest with me in answering this question. Did you know it was going to be that big? And how nervous were you as you went through that process, knowing that it could be incredibly sizable?
Doderer: Well, certainly in the beginning, we didn’t know that it could be as big as 50 million. We put together a couple of different opportunities for him to consider when it comes to investing in child health in Arkansas, and put together a 15 million dollars or 30 million dollars and a 50 million dollars proposal to him. By the time we had the opportunity to visit with his foundation folks here in Little Rock, we knew that he was only considering a 50 million dollars gift for us. So that certainly brought the anxiety to a head, because that’s an extraordinary gift, the largest philanthropic gift in the history of Arkansas Children’s, and certainly personally the largest one I've ever shepherded in my career as a healthcare executive.
So it was a little anxiety provoking. However, when we got to sit with him in person, he’s a smart, prudent businessman. He’s also warm and gracious, has a genuine interest in improving child health across our country, and it became a very natural conversation with him at his home. And in the end, I think we found it to be a great partnership for both of us. Him to invest some of his money in Arkansas and Arkansas Children’s, and for us to engage deeply in partnership with him and the other children’s hospitals that he is supporting as he creates the Golisano Children’s Alliance to allow us to work together with other children’s hospitals across the country to further health care for kids.
Brock: So tell me what you will do with this 50 million dollar gift. And I’m not sure. Is it kind of coming all at once? Is it going to come in stages? Tell me a little bit about that. But also, more importantly, where will you use that money in terms of investment?
Doderer: We have an unending list of needs in Arkansas to support child health and create Arkansas as the safest, healthiest place to be a child. And so we will put that 50 million dollars to good use over the next several years. The initial investment will be supporting our existing construction that’s happening on the campus in Little Rock. You know, we have 370 million dollars in total construction happening across our health system. About 280-290 of that is here in Little Rock. So we will contribute the first ten million actually towards this construction project that we are about halfway through.
But I have a number of other initiatives we will use that money for in the coming years. In July of 2025, we launched our next five year strategic plan. So we’re just halfway through the first year of that. As you might imagine, it’s bold, even bolder than our last strategic plan, and really calls for us to get deeply engaged in delivering health care closer to where kids live. And so one of our strategies that I believe this gift will help us fund is considering how we take care of complex, chronic kids in rural Arkansas. We’ve looked at the statistics deeply, and the number of children who drive significant distances to get to Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock for routine care of very complex issues. It’s a big number, and that’s a burden on families that we wish to alleviate.
Our current strategic plan, one of our goals over the next five years, is to reduce the travel miles and travel time families have when they seek care from Arkansas Children’s. So how do we bring care to them? We intend to build a virtual care hub here in Little Rock that will allow us to monitor children in their home communities. Allowing them to engage with local providers and be supported by community health workers so that their routine checkups, think type one diabetes, think congestive heart failure, think cystic fibrosis, those kinds of really complex diseases can take place in their hometown of Magnolia, El Dorado, Mena, you name it?
Brock: Right.
Doderer: But that infrastructure is expensive and complex to build. And so our next kind of thinking on the gift from the Golisano Foundation would be to build out that virtual hub, allowing us to take care of these kids remotely. But I have a number of other ideas we'll work through in the coming months, as we understand how the gift will be received. Our strategic plan calls for major initiatives in revolutionizing medicine, regionalizing care, and then realizing our promise of a better tomorrow for the kids of Arkansas through improved child health statistics. And I think we’ll be able to use that money to advance all three of those big aims of our strategic plan.
Brock: That’s Marcy Doderer, she’s the CEO of Arkansas Children’s. You can catch our full interview at talkbusiness.net. That’s all for this edition of the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal report. I’m Roby Brock. We’ll see you next time.
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