By Denise Perreault
PBN Staff Writer
It was the spring of 1997 when Maria Montanaro took over as CEO and president of the Thundermist Health Center, headquartered in Woonsocket. The place was a mess.
Located in cramped quarters on a gritty side street, the tiny health center was $250,000 in the red and the staff was in turmoil.
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.
The Cranston native met her husband, scientist David Warner, while earning a bachelor’s degree in physical education and health at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. 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 programin social work which she describes as “more like an MBA than an MSW,” with heavy emphasis on business, administration and planning.
She was delighted in 1987 when her husband took a job in Groton, Conn., because she and her family could live in Rhode Island. She landed a job teaching at Cranston High School West and by now was the mother of three sons. “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.
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.
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. 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.
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 challenge to face.
She was at Thundermist dealing with all the turmoil for just four months in 1997 when, at the age of 39, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She faced a year of intensive treatment, including surgeries, chemotherapy and radiation.
She arranged for a four-day workweek and took only two weeks off. Today, after 11 years, she is cancer free 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. •
