This is the 12th and final in a series of a dozen PBN articles focusing on the backgrounds, challenges and successes of some of the area’s most influential and interesting business women. The series began Sept. 12.
It was the spring of 1997 when Maria Montanaro took over as CEO and president of the Woonsocket-based Thundermist Health Center. The place was a mess.
Located in cramped quarters on a gritty side street, the tiny health center was in deep financial trouble, $250,000 in the red and the staff was in turmoil. “The financial bleeding was fatal” if it couldn’t be stopped, Montanaro recalled. With an annual budget of $5 million, the health center then had a staff of 80 that treated about 5,700 patients each year, most of them low-income and uninsured.
Montanaro was accustomed to taking on tough cases, though, and in many ways the situation at Thundermist was just another incongruous square in the crazy patchwork quilt that had become her life.
When she was a graduate student studying for her master’s degree in social work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the early 1980s, she had read “Composing a Life” by Mary Catherine Bateson, a book that recounts the improvisational lives of five extraordinary women. “The point Bateson made is that women – because of their roles as caregivers, wives and mothers – often follow career paths that are not linear but are like patchwork quilt, a kind of crazy quilt,” Montanaro recalls.
She could relate. A Cranston native, Montanaro met her husband – scientist David Warner – while earning a bachelor’s degree in physical education and health at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, and the two married shortly after her 1980 graduation. She followed him to Illinois, where he did graduate work at the university and she taught physical education.
Montanaro was fortunate because the university allowed her to build her own master’s program, which she describes as “more like an MBA than an MSW,” with heavy emphasis on business, administration and planning. “It really trained me very well for what I do today,” she says.
However, for many years it looked as if Montanaro would never add an MSW patch to the crazy quilt of her life. Her husband took a job in St. Louis. She quit graduate school and went back to teaching, taking a low-paying job at a private Catholic school. Her most joyous moments came when she went on “peace and justice” trips with her students to Mexico and Haiti. “Once again, I was pulled into a poverty relief role,” she says.
She was delighted in 1987 when her husband took a job in Groton, Conn., because she and her family could live in Rhode Island, settling in Wakefield. She landed a job teaching at Cranston High School West and by now was the mother of three sons. It seemed life was perfect. “I had finally arrived as a teacher, making good pay with job security,” she says. “And you know what? I was bitterly unhappy.”
At the urging of her husband, she contacted the University of Illinois and learned that she could obtain her MSW if she returned for one semester of course work. She had no money to pay the tuition, never mind living expenses in Illinois. “I thought and I prayed long and hard,” she says. Then, like the pattern of a patchwork quilt seen from afar, the pieces fell into place.
A friend in Illinois gave her a car, a dorm room opened up just two weeks before classes started, the university to her utter surprise gave her a $7,000 loan, and she won a teaching assistantship that covered tuition, room and board, plus gave her a stipend. Deeply spiritual, she can still hear the woman in the bursar’s office say, as she handed Montanaro a $7,000 check, “God always will provide if you are following your path.”
After being in charge of separate health centers in Cranston and New London, Conn., for a total of eight years, she was well equipped to take over Thundermist in 1997, near-fatal financial bleeding and all. “I began leading the turnaround,” she says. A strong believer in strategic plans, “within a month, we had a road map to take us through the first year and a half,” she says. “We had to go back to basics. It was all about rebuilding, it was all about reforming the structure. I was shaking and rattling everything.” She ended her first full fiscal year with a $250,000 surplus, a budget swing of $500,000.
In time, over the next 11 years, Thundermist would open two new locations in Wakefield and West Warwick and, in August of 2005, move into spacious quarters in a former department store in downtown Woonsocket, a $6.5 million expansion. The new quarters are light, bright and airy, with a system of patient control that ensures confidentiality, and have been featured in national trade journals. “We get at least two visitors a month from all over the country to learn about the unique design of our building,” Montanaro says. Today, with a $16.5 million annual operating budget, Thundermist treats approximately 26,000 patients every year with a staff of 270.
But before she and her health center could achieve such success, life had one more patch for Montanaro’s quilt, a dark patch.
She had been at Thundermist dealing with all the turmoil for just four months in when – in 1997, at the age of 39 – she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She faced a year of intensive treatment, including surgeries, chemotherapy and radiation.
“I decided I wasn’t going to lose any more time to the disease than I had to,” Montanaro recalls. She arranged for a four-day work week and took only two weeks off in what was “an exhausting year,” she says.
She lost her hair and her stamina, and she walked with a cane for a while. But today, after 11 years, she is cancer0free at the age of 50.
“It’s never a good thing to get cancer,” Montanaro says, “but it helped ground me as a person. I learned that your job is your job, it’s not your actual identity. Anything you think is important is temporary and can go away in a second. You can lose a lot of what defines you, and you find you’re still here. So, you do your best work and you live day by day.” •
Read about other Business Women, in the rest of the PBN series, here.
