Gottlieb mulling options after winning award

 

 

By Lisa Demer

Anchorage Daily News

 

      Katherine Gottlieb, Alaska's bona fide creative whiz, is tackling a tough test on money and ideas and herself.

      The challenge: How to spend a half-million bucks.

      Sound like a blast? Think of this. She wants to put the money to good use. Really good use. She wants to help starving children and villagers with no jobs. And not only that, she wants the money to grow into even bigger and better things. Her ideas aren't yet jelled, but she's getting there.

      All of this has been weighing on her mind since September, when she became Alaska's first MacArthur Fellow. The prestigious award brings her $500,000 over five years, no strings attached.

      Except the one that tugs at her, quietly, all the time. People win the honor because of their potential for creative and intellectual greatness. Even if MacArthur Fellows are free to blow the money, they don't, because that is not the kind of person picked, said Daniel J. Socolow, director of the Mac-Arthur Fellows program.

      Gottlieb is president and chief executive officer of Southcentral Foundation, the medical arm of Cook Inlet Region Inc. She's led it to become a robust health center for Alaska Natives in Anchorage with services that include obstetrics, family medicine and pediatrics, and social and mental health programs.

      Most people find news of a MacArthur fellowship astonishingly good and the program surprisingly simple.

      "Here is a piece of money and much more than the money is our confidence that you really are terrific and you know better than we would what to do with it," Socolow said.

      People can't apply to be fellows and their friends can't nominate them. Instead they are vetted through an exhaustive behind-the-scenes process at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

      Nominators in various fields who rotate every year are tapped by the foundation to secretly submit names of creative people of all types: artists, novelists, poets, scientists, historians, educators, a blacksmith, a farmer. A broke ragtime pianist in Chicago won the award last fall just as the gas to his apartment was cut off, according to a story in the Chicago Tribune. Hundreds are nominated each year.

      They are judged on just three factors, Socolow said: Are they extraordinarily creative? Do they have potential to do more? How would the fellowship help them reach it?

      Once they are picked, the foundation asks for no reports, no proof that the money helped them. Some pay their debts. Some quit their day jobs.

      The fellowships are commonly called genius awards but that's too limiting, Socolow said.

      "The people we pick are taking risks, being bold, experimenting beyond the imaginable," he said.

      Gottlieb was one of 23 who became a fellow last fall after being checked out for about two years.

      "I personally feel I want to give back, somehow, some way. And I want to utilize these funds in a way that expands something," Gottlieb said. "Everything I do, I want it multiplied."

      It's been a hard trip to this good place.

      Gottlieb is part Aleut and was born in Old Harbor, on Kodiak Island. She grew up in Seldovia. Her own mom was a heavy drinker. She became the kid in charge even though she wasn't the oldest. By 16, she was a high school dropout and pregnant. She married the father but said he was abusive. After six years she escaped with their two kids on a well-planned dash on the ferry out of Seldovia, she said.

      Now 53, she has six children, 20 grandchildren, a master's in business, a brilliant smile. She is married to Southcentral Foundation's chief of staff, Kevin Gottlieb, who started there as a dentist. He has advised her not to rush into anything with the award.

      In 1987, Gottlieb started at Southcentral Foundation as a receptionist. The budget was $3 million and the agency had 24 employees. "A baby organization," she said. The Indian Health Service was in charge of most Alaska Native health care and patients had to wait hours to see a doctor.

      Four years after she started on the phones, Gottlieb became the person in charge. Now Southcentral Foundation has about 1,200 employees and a budget of $118 million. It is co-owner of all health care services on the Alaska Native Medical Center campus, where it runs the primary care clinic. Alaska Natives make up two-thirds of the work force. One of her innovations: Patients can get in to see their doctor the same day they call.

      She has turned to her past as she pushed Southcentral to help people with problems beyond injuries and illness. There's the Family Wellness Warriors Initiative, an effort to fight family violence and child abuse. The Pathway Home provides residential treatment for adolescents for substance abuse and emotional and behavior problems. And lately, she's encouraged more services to allow elders to stay at home as they age.

      The award already has stopped her from second-guessing herself so much.

      "I always thought, 'Is that a good idea?' " Gottlieb said. "Now I think, 'That's a really good idea!' "

      She figured she would be bombarded with strange and wonderful ideas of how to spend so much money, but wasn't. Organizations asked for mundane things. Her kids joked about how they'd love new cars and her grandchildren talked about toys, nothing out of the ordinary.

      So she's been on her own. Three big ideas are floating in her mind so far.

      One, she's already acting on. She's found a low-overhead organization that helps to feed starving children, not ones in Alaska but those seriously in need like those in the poorest parts of Africa.

      "I feel it's been ... just a heavy burden laid on my heart, thinking about kids who are starving," Gottlieb said. She did not want to say much more, or even identify the organization, because she said this is spiritual giving, between her and God.

      Then she wants to do something terrific for employees at Southcentral Foundation. "To me, I feel like I am surrounded by geniuses," she said. "I want to share the fun of this wealth with them."

      She keeps going around and around with her third idea, her hope of creating village jobs.

      It was a topic she discussed in May, when she flew to Washington, D.C., to meet with Newt Gingrich, the former U.S. House speaker who still pushes the conservative agenda as an author and consultant.

      Gingrich said through a spokesman that Gottlieb is "an extraordinary individual with a remarkable personal story." He had heard of her through a top agency manager and wanted to hear about wellness warriors. Gottlieb read his book on transforming health care and thought his big-picture view was the same as the customer-owner concept already in place at Southcentral Foundation.

      Gingrich talked about ways to sustain rural economies, about how medical providers can't truly help someone who has no hope of a job.

      "When he's saying that, I am sitting up. I have a silly grin on my face," Gottlieb said. "I'm like 'Whoa.' He's saying what I was hoping to do with the MacArthur award."

      Then he told her why creating businesses in small communities wouldn't necessarily work. Not everyone wants to do the same job. She left the meeting feeling sad.

      "Some of us want to fish and some of us want to stay home. Some of us wouldn't mind working in a shoe factory. Others of us would never step foot into a cannery shucking crab," Gott-lieb said.

      But she hasn't given up. She's now thinking about holding a contest with a reward for whoever comes up with the best idea for creating good village jobs. All interesting possibilities would be published. She'd try to get government to pay for putting the idea in place.

      This summer, Gottlieb is doing something she's never done in all her years at Southcentral. She's taking more than a month off. She intentionally hasn't made a plan even for a bike ride.

      "If I can keep myself really clear, I think ideas will jell," she said.