sue allon

National Jewish Hospital

I have a company that I started a year and a half ago, Allonhill. It’s the regeneration of Murrayhill, a company that I started in 1997 and sold in 2004. We manage mortgage risk, and although I had a nice time for a few years when I wasn’t working and running a business, I was discouraged by the way the industry and company I worked hard to create had succumbed to the setbacks that plagued the mortgage industry as a whole.

Allonhill has been a roller coaster ride without a safety bar, and is a lot more fun now that it’s up and running with an active market behind it. We now have 165 employees, up from 62 in December, and 16 the preceding December. We’re profitable, and we’ve captured the flag that meant the most to me going into this — we were on the first securitization to come to market since the meltdown in ‘08.

I’ve managed to go from the life of book club, socializing and travel, to needing to squeeze in time to cook dinner for my family and find a way to escape for the weekend. I love tennis, and being on the court a few times a week is the one thing I’ve clung to for the sake of self-preservation. I have a 12-year-old daughter, Natalie, and two beautiful, grown stepchildren, Rachel and Aaron, all of whom give me and my husband, Harvey, so much to be excited about in our personal lives. If not for all of them, I’d be too absorbed in my startup company to have a life outside work, but they keep me in the game, every single day.

With all that I’ve had going on the past couple of years, I’ve had to resist the many incredible organizations that have asked me to help them. I am focused now exclusively on three organizations, and they all have one central message: education. I’m on the advisory board for my business school, the Tuck School at Dartmouth; I’m a trustee for Colorado College, and I’m on the board of National Jewish Health.

I joined the board of National Jewish Health despite the fact that education, not medical care, is at the core of my philanthropic beliefs. I’ve gained a tremendous awareness of respiratory illness, and an incredible appreciation for what this institution, the number-one respiratory research hospital in the world, does for its patients, and I now have a deep commitment to the medical aspect of NJH. The Kunsberg School is what compelled me to join National Jewish Health, though.

Kunsberg is a public school on the campus of NJH. Any child with chronic illness can attend Kunsberg. This school gives day-long care to its K through eighth-graders, many of whom are terribly sick when they start at the school. These children, who are mostly referred through NJH, would otherwise miss extensive periods of school, while undergoing treatments that are debilitating and require nursing supervision. Often, once released from a treatment program, these kids would be behind in school, and wouldn’t have an ability through the normal public school system to recover. Many would drop out, or get sick again and fall further behind. Kunsberg takes these children in, and makes sure they receive medical treatment every day. They attend class in small classrooms with other sick kids, so they don’t feel out of place. They are provided with physical and mental therapy, to help them cope with terrible family situations as well as issues related to being physically challenged.

Ninety percent of the students at Kunsberg come from low-income families. They wear uniforms, which creates a financial burden for their families at the start of school, but simplifies and relieves the burden as the year progresses. And they get good food every day. When you visit this school, it is immediately obvious that to these kids, school is a safe place, and often the only place, where they are loved and cared for, and where they can focus on simply being kids. Many of them come from loving families, but many come from families under so much stress that they can’t provide for a sick child, on top of other problems.

Kunsberg receives funding from the Colorado Department of Education, but it is an amount that is the same as for a typical public school student. Kunsberg spends many times the amount provided by the CDE on its students, and depends heavily on the fundraising of NJH to pay its costs. The school isn’t open in the summer, because there is no funding, yet these kids’ lives don’t change over the summer. They are still sick, and they are still living in circumstances that don’t give them the support and care they need. I hope to someday see Kunsberg open all summer, so these children can stay on track. I’d love to see every one of them stay all the way through eighth grade, and go on someday to Colorado College, and maybe even to Tuck.

As busy as I am, I sometimes find it hard to feel enthusiastic about the time involved for board meetings and other work that I do for these organizations. I have a song that I play in my car before every meeting. It’s a painfully poignant country song, by Ronnie Milsap, called “My Life.” I make myself listen to it, word by word, over and over, and by the time I get there, I always find that my head is once again connected to my heart, and I feel good about being there.

“…I want to know what was in my heart, didn’t just stay in my heart, and when I die, I want to know whatever heaven gave me, I gave it all back.”

www.nationaljewish.org