Living Our Why – wayne centrone

What is our why? I remember discussing Health Bridges’s “why ” and our work with a core group of supporters many years back. We were building on the lessons we gained from the now-famous Simon Sinek TEDx talk of 2014. The “why” we crafted back then has shifted a bit over the years, but the core, the essence of our “why” remains – we exist to champion children and the communities that care for them. 

This guiding force leads all our work – from our train-the-trainer program to bring newborn resuscitation skills to all healthcare professionals in Perú to our Comunidad Girasoles work and the goal of ensuring every child has access to health, hope, home, and purpose. Everything we do is about making the world a better place for children. We know our “why.” 

However, more than simply knowing why we exist is required. To this end, we have spent many hours structuring our methodology – defining the mechanisms we use to bring the “why” of our vision to reality. We’ve developed our Centers of Excellence work to get our “why” into action. Our efforts focus on developing precise, easily accessible, scalable models that can be adopted and adapted by child-welfare serving organizations to enhance the care they bring to children who have lived through the experience of trauma, neglect, violence, and abandonment. 

We have a significant lift before us. While we continue to care for over 50 children in our Comunidad and Casa Girasoles, we are also building models that we hope will be useful in transforming child welfare services everywhere. It’s a lot like building a plane and flying it simultaneously – it all sounds great until the wheels get off the ground. The challenges come from the simple fact that we need financing to feed, clothe, nurture, and prepare all the youth in the Girasoles Program – and we need the money to develop the Center of Excellence models and evaluate their effectiveness and efficacy. 

It seems like a lot at times . . . and then I remember our “why.” Then I remind myself why we have dedicated our lives to this work. That is when I settle in and live our “why” daily!