Adam Helman With IMD Guest House Foundation

Intro: [00:00:03] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studio in Chicago, Illinois. It’s time for Chicago Business Radio. Brought to you by Firm Space, your private sanctuary for productivity and growth. To learn more, go to firm spacecom. Now, here’s your host.

Max Kantor: [00:00:21] Hey, everybody. And welcome back to another episode of Chicago Business Radio. I’m your host, Max Kantor. And before we get started, as always, today’s show is sponsored by Firm Space. Big thanks to firm Space because without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. And we got a really good one for you today. On today’s show, we have the executive director of the Guest House Foundation. So please welcome to the show, Adam Helman. Welcome to the show, Adam.

Adam Helman: [00:00:47] Thanks so much, Max. It’s really great to be here.

Max Kantor: [00:00:49] I’m excited to talk to you about everything you’re doing. So let’s jump right in. Tell me a little bit about the Guest House Foundation.

Adam Helman: [00:00:56] Okay. So the guest house is a registered 500 and 1C3 nonprofit. We provide temporary lodging for medical patients and their families when they need to stay near the hospital for treatment. We’re the only organization in the Chicago area that supports patients of any age receiving any type of treatment. And if you think about what it is that we do for people who have sort of advanced medical conditions, serious conditions like cancer, they need an organ transplant or some kind of hospital treatment. That specialized treatment is located only in a small number of hospitals often, and the hospitals want the patients nearby but want to minimize the time they spend as inpatients. So they really like to support patients as outpatients as much as possible, and we facilitate that.

Max Kantor: [00:01:52] Now, how did the Guest House Foundation come to be and how did you get involved with them?

Adam Helman: [00:01:57] The guest house came to be in 19 in the late 1990s, and it was started by an administrator at Rush University Medical Center, which is one of our hospital partners who is working with pediatric patients. And there was a patient whose family was coming in from Chile and they needed a place to stay. And she was sort of shocked that the hospital didn’t have any facility available for them. So she started just working to make that happen. And she agitated, I guess, agitated. She reached out to people in the hospital. She reached out to some of the other hospitals around us, University of Illinois Hospital and Stroger Hospital of Cook County, and just started moving to kind of get things organized. The organization was founded in 1999 and then started taking care of patients in 2005. I joined the guest house in 2015. It was a midlife career change for me. I had spent most of my professional career working in for profit marketing and advertising, things like that, and I ended up going into this sort of later in life because my wife and I relocated to Chicago, which is home for me. And I decided after a while it was time for a change in direction professionally now that I was sort of back home living in Chicago.

Max Kantor: [00:03:35] Now, Guest House provides so many benefits to all of its guests. Right. But can you talk a little bit about the practical and the emotional benefits? Because there’s so many when you have visitors staying with you guys.

Adam Helman: [00:03:49] Absolutely. So the practical, which is an important part of it, we help about 700 families a year and provide around 12,000 nights of service. And for people who can pay, they pay a small fee for people who can’t pay. We discount the rate for them or they don’t pay anything at all. We never turn anybody away for lack of fees. The practical part of it is that Chicago is a pretty expensive city. And if you’re coming here for. Six weeks, eight weeks longer. We have people who stay with us for a year. Sometimes the thought of. Paying for a hotel is kind of outrageous. It’s just, you know, the average price of a hotel in Chicago is probably about $189 a night, plus 17% tax plus parking. So the cost goes up pretty high. So just being able to stay somewhere that’s affordable is a big, big difference for people and really enables them to be able to stay here. The fact that also there’s no particular limit to how long someone can stay, they can stay for one night. They can stay for as long as they’re in treatment. The only. The only limit on that is their medical team saying they need to be here so they can be near treatment. So from a practical standpoint, we really enable people to receive life saving care that they might not otherwise be able to receive or complete. From an emotional standpoint, and this is something that when I got into this work, I did not understand quite as much or fully appreciate. But. We’ve all sort of, I’m sure in our families have had this feeling where somebody has had a serious medical diagnosis.

Adam Helman: [00:05:44] And that’s a very isolating feeling for the family. All of a sudden they start to feel alone. Oftentimes, patients and families start to feel like they are of a their diagnosis. And, you know, it starts to be, oh, that’s the family with the person who needs the liver transplant or that’s the family of the cancer patient or that’s the family with the child in the neonatal ICU, the NICU. And they stop feeling like they’re people or they’re individuals. And the emotional benefit of what we do is that we really create a sense of community for the people who stay here, which is really, really important. So sort of a sense of being found for them. It’s almost like they’re lost before, before they stay here. There’s sort of an added tension. Somebody says, Oh, you’ve got to come to Chicago. It’s a city you don’t know very well. You might not know anybody here, and you’re going to have to stay for two months. And people, you know, the natural reaction is, oh my God, what am I going to say? How am I going to afford it? How will it possibly work for me? And we can remove. A certain aspect of tension and loneliness that goes along with that because we can help people by giving them a place to stay. And one thing to be sure about, there’s still the ambiguity that goes along with medical care. But there’s that one aspect of care, that one aspect of life, and then the opportunity to interact with other people. That really is a great emotional benefit.

Max Kantor: [00:07:24] So tell me a little bit about the facilities, too, that your guests are staying and what are they like? How are the rooms built? Is it fully furnished? What should someone expect when they come to stay with you?

Adam Helman: [00:07:37] So when people stay with us, we have 47 fully furnished apartments, so either 1 or 2 bedroom apartments. But each one has a separate kind of living room, dining room area. They have a kitchen that’s fully equipped plates, pots, pans, dishes, silverware, everything you would need to cook appliances in the room and private bath. And they also have streaming entertainment on television and free Wi-Fi. So they really are they’re small, but they’re fully self-contained apartments. And that’s important because when people are staying for a long time, they need to have a little space and they also need to be able to cook for themselves. And I was talking earlier about the expense of staying in Chicago. You’ve got you know, if you’re staying in a hotel, you’ve got both the hotel expense and then the daily meal expense as well. So the apartments, we have 47 apartments, all of them fully furnished, ready to stay in. When the guests come here, they’re all in one location. We’re on the campus of the University of Illinois, Chicago, which puts us in the middle of some of our partner hospitals. We also have a partnership with UChicago Medicine in Hyde Park. So we’ll have patients from UChicago Stay here as well. And I can talk about some of our other partners too, and some of our other programs, but the apartments are really just fully furnished and fully set up for people to stay here, which is, you know, very important for them. We also have a community room that’s open during the week, all day, and we’ll have a volunteer program where people will come in and prepare meals once a week like a group meal for for the guests to either eat in the community room or take back to their rooms. And then people will come and do other volunteer activity there as well to help the guests out.

Max Kantor: [00:09:30] Funny that you mentioned volunteering, because I was curious about how you guys staff the guest home or the guest house. So do you have is it only run by volunteers? Do you have some permanent staff that helps out? How does that work?

Adam Helman: [00:09:43] So we have a small permanent staff. We have seven people on the staff right now. And it’s a variety of there’s myself we have a person who works in fundraising, who’s a director of fundraising, and she has somebody who works for her. And we have somebody who runs our volunteerism and programing. And then we have a guest services team who are employed, who actually work with the guests and their referrals and keeping us organized for people to stay here. So it’s a small staff and then we have a lot of people who come and volunteer. We’ll have probably about 400 different people come through and volunteer for us in 2023. We’re building our volunteer program back up. We were as big as 800 before COVID, and slowly that’s coming back and we’re bringing more and more groups of people in. One of the things that renting space from the University of Illinois helps us with is that it makes us efficient. So the university provides the overnight staff, the university provides the maintenance for the building because it’s their building. We rent the space from them. The university provides the security through the campus police.

Max Kantor: [00:11:06] Now talk about your the hospital partners you guys work with and the types of programs that you run to for patients and their families.

Adam Helman: [00:11:15] Right. So we have four core hospital partners, and that’s Rush University Medical Center, Stroger Hospital of Cook County, U. Chicago Medicine and University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System, or UI Health, because that’s kind of a mouthful. So those are all of our partners and each one slightly different groups of patients. We’re open to any diagnosis, but from Stroger we’ll get primarily either people who are traumatic injury victims, their families or the families with babies in the NICU. Those are the most common Stroger patients. The most common. Rush patients are cancer patients. Um, and then we also have a program with Rush, and we have a lot of other diagnoses along with them. But cancer is their biggest population. The other big population we have associated with Rush are veterans who are getting treated for PTSD through the Road Home program at Rush, which is a wonderful program that provides two weeks of treatment for groups of up to 18 veterans who come and stay with us while they’re going through that therapy sort of all day, every day. So that’s kind of the rush model. Ui Health, the University of Illinois, they send US transplant patients is their biggest single population. We also have neurology and cardiology and some other hematology patients.

Adam Helman: [00:12:51] But organ transplants is their probably their biggest single population. And then UChicago, our cancer patients and organ transplant patients and cardiology at UChicago, we’ve really started to do more with heart transplant patients. So that’s a small number of patients every year that we work with, but they stay for a very long time. So heart transplant patients and their families. Um, we also, outside of our hospital partners, we also have partnerships with American Cancer Society. So we’re able to support patients from receiving treatment, cancer patients receiving treatment at any Chicago area hospital. Um, and likewise, we have a relationship with the Gift of Hope organ and Tissue Donor network, and that opens us up to support organ transplant patients from any Chicago area hospital and the two hospitals which contribute or send patients to us. The most out of that are, um, Northwestern and Loyola send us both oncology patients and organ transplant patients. And then we’ve also had funding at different times to work with patients from Shirley Ryan Ability Center. We do a little work with Lurie Family Hospital when they have somebody who needs help. So it’s a variety of hospitals and partners and a pretty big network now of places that will send us patients for different reasons.

Max Kantor: [00:14:27] Now later this year in May, you’re you’re having your only fundraiser for 2023. The house always wins. What is that event and how can people get involved with it?

Adam Helman: [00:14:39] Well, that’s really we’re so excited. This is going to be our only fundraiser of 2023. The house always wins. Um is going to be a terrific fundraiser that offers great food. Cocktails, musical entertainment and casino entertainment. So people have the opportunity to enjoy a great fundraiser and also to play casino games. And so we had an event sort of like that in 2019 to celebrate our 20th anniversary. Thought we’d roll that out again and again and again, and it kind of fell by the wayside with COVID. But we’re really excited to bring this event back. So it’s going to be the evening of Thursday, May 11th. Um, the event starts at 630 and goes to 9:30 p.m. Um, and it’s going to be at a terrific facility called the Walden, which is on Walnut Street, a little west of Damon, so not too far from our neighborhood, not too far from United Center for people who are familiar with that in Chicago. But it’s a terrific facility which has a great gourmet kitchen on site. So the food is going to be really good. We have terrific entertainment lined up. And we also will have a VIP reception for people who want to attend that starting at 530. The best way to find out about the event is you can go to our website, which is w-w-w dot guest house chicago.org. Again guest house chicago.org. And on the slider you’ll see the house always wins located right there. It will be, I guarantee, a really, really fun and enjoyable evening.

Max Kantor: [00:16:42] So Adam, what does guest house need more of? Whether it’s volunteers, whether it’s donations, how can our listeners help you guys and support you guys?

Adam Helman: [00:16:52] Well, we you know.

Adam Helman: [00:16:54] I’m glad you’re asking that. Certainly, donations are very helpful. Um, we as as I said, we don’t send patients away for financial reasons. So we really anything that can help us run our programing, be sure to be able to accommodate patients at their time of need is really terrific. So funding is great. Uh, funding for cancer patients, funding for organ transplant patients, funding to help families with sick children, funding to help military veterans struggling with PTSD, and then any other diagnosis. That’s all very, very important. Volunteerism is also really important. As I said, we’re really trying to build up our volunteer program and some of the things that people do. They’ll certainly come in and either bring in a dinner or prepare a dinner. Typically on Thursday nights we have a group coming in tonight that’s going to do a volunteer dinner for our guests. So that’s a volunteer opportunity. There are other volunteer opportunities, such as coming in and baking during the day. We have family groups from an organization called the Honeycomb Project that come in on Saturdays, a couple of days a weekend, and they’ll do cookie baking and they’ll make encouragement cards for the patients. Um, people can also do things like as volunteers, you can either bring in items to make welcome bags and goodie bags for our guests, or you can do those at home or at your place of work and bring those in, or we can arrange to pick them up. There are a lot of of different varieties of things to do. You can find us on Volunteermatch or you can contact our office and that number is (312) 996-1167. And say you’re interested in volunteering and they can connect you with Jan, who runs our volunteering and programing. So almost anything that people are interested in doing and feel like helping out, we can do short of construction. We have to work with the university, but we don’t do remodeling ourselves or let volunteers do that because that’s the university’s end of things. But other than that, we can do just about anything people want.

Max Kantor: [00:19:27] Adam, my final question for you is a question I like to ask every guest that comes on Chicago Business Radio. For you, what is the most rewarding part of what you get to do with Guest House?

Adam Helman: [00:19:39] Oh, I’ll tell you exactly what that is. That’s a really easy answer for me. It’s getting to. See and interact with the people who get the benefit of our hard work every day. That’s for me and also for my staff. When I worked in corporate America, I really enjoyed that and that was terrific. I worked for a big company and the people who seemed to benefit from my work there were the stockholders and, you know, good on them. I’m really happy to have supported them and I felt great about that life. But working in a small nonprofit like this, where our offices are right in the middle of where all the guests stay, is just wonderful because we get to see just day by day and interact with every day the people who are getting the benefit of what we do.

Max Kantor: [00:20:32] Adam, you said it a little earlier, but if people want to learn more about volunteering or donating or even attending your event, the house always wins. Where can they find you guys online? Social media. How can they reach out?

Adam Helman: [00:20:46] Yes, The best place to find us is at our website. Again, that’s guest house chicago.org. So you can find us there. We are on social media. We’re on LinkedIn, we’re on Facebook as well. So you can always find us on those sites. And our phone number is three. One, two. 9961167. So those are all ways to find us. If you go to the website, you can cover everything. You can learn about volunteering, you can learn about making a donation, you can learn about attending. The house always wins. You can do everything. So the probably the one stop that gets it all is guest house chicago.org. W-w-w dot guest house chicago.org.

Max Kantor: [00:21:40] Awesome. Well Adam, thank you so much for being a guest today. I mean, you guys are just doing really great work for the Chicago community and and I appreciate you coming on the show today to talk about all that you’re doing.

Adam Helman: [00:21:51] Well, thanks so much, Max. It’s great talking to you. And it’s my pleasure.

Max Kantor: [00:21:55] And thank you for listening to another episode of Chicago Business Radio. I’m your host, Max Kanter, and we’ll see you next time.

Intro: [00:22:04] This episode of Chicago Business Radio has been brought to you by firm space, your private sanctuary for productivity and growth. To learn more, go to firm Space.com.