Volunteers helping others in "moments of unexpected tragedies" is one of the highest callings of the human spirit, according to the director of the American Red Cross.
And it's a trait she believes her organization and the LDS Church's humanitarian services programs share.Dr. Bernadine Healy was in Salt Lake City on Tuesday to meet with the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and then she toured the Huntsman Cancer Institute with its founder, Jon M. Huntsman, and executive director, Dr. Stephen Prescott.
"I've been extraordinarily impressed with the humanitarian relief activities of the LDS Church," she said. "They are working in the same places we work, and we share overlapping priorities and values. We both have faith that you can care for people and give them dignity at the same time as you help them get back on their feet."
Healy said that desire to help people help themselves means the American Red Cross gives people cleanup kits instead of cleaning for them after natural disasters. It means the agency-run homeless shelter in New York puts time limits on how long individuals can stay, then works hard to help them get jobs and education and mental health counseling so they will be able to leave.
And she points out to those she meets that everyone needs a helping hand at some point. But the nice thing about people, she said, "is the volunteer spirit -- one human being helping another human being in need."
The American Red Cross and the LDS Church have cooperated on several projects overseas, helping communities devastated by natural disaster. Most recently, they're collaborating, along with others, to provide food to people who are starving in Ethiopia.
The visit was Healy's third to Utah. She came in the late '80s to speak at the University of Utah Medical School graduation. She remembers waiting with others and hearing them talk about their vision of creating a genetics center where the locally generated genealogy could be tapped to expand knowledge. "It seemed like such an ambitious dream," she said.
She came back a few years later when the U. dedicated its Institute of Human Genetics, the realization of the dream. And today, just northeast of the genetics institute, she viewed the cancer institute.
"It's all such a transfer of vision to basic science and reality," she said. "It's amazing."
Healy said the American Red Cross faces increasing challenges as "expectation of the public of what we have an obligation to do grows, almost exponentially. We are obligated to continue in contemporary ways to meet needs, always in the spirit of respecting human dignity."
That means remaining neutral, seeking equality and working in a spirit of "humanitarian universality," she said.
The agency has more than 2 million volunteers and about 4.5 million blood donors, some of whom give "quite regularly" to help the agency with its "stewardship of the American blood supply."
Without an adequate blood supply, Healy said, there would be no cancer institute, no chemotherapy, no intensive care units, no liver transplants and more. She was delighted that the LDS Church Relief Society plans to hold a major blood drive next week, expected to collect around 2,000 units of blood.
And the church's humanitarian services, like the American Red Cross, is "quintessentially American. It's the grass-roots American rising to help the nation. Probably nowhere else could create what I saw today," she said.
You can reach Lois M. Collins by e-mail at lois@desnews.com