Regehr ‘thrives’ back home

Thrive Allen County, recently in receipt of its largest grant to date, has a staff that is much smaller than its impact in the region might suggest.
The engine room of the group’s downtown office is made up of a snug collection of four desks, at which you can usually find Damaris Kunkler (program director), John Robertson (grant writer), and Georgia Masterson (head of Circles of Allen County). 
On Oct. 1 Thrive turned over the fourth desk to its newest employee, Lisse Regehr.
Regehr, a native Iolan who has lived and worked in Minneapolis-St. Paul for the last 11 years, was hired as Thrive’s Community Healthcare Educator. Her job will be to assist with enrollment, promotion, volunteer recruitment, and reporting for the Health Insurance Marketplace, the signature program of the Affordable Care Act.
Regehr learned of the position through her brother-in-law, Job Springer, a recent Iola returnee himself.
Her reaction? “I said ‘I don’t know what it is, but I love the title!’ And I knew I could get right on board”—which, given Regehr’s resumé, is an understatement.
Regehr is a smart, energetic talker with an easy smile, and one of those rare individuals who has spent her entire working life serving others.

Upon graduating from K-State, Regehr joined the St. Joseph Worker Program, a yearlong volunteer group in Minneapolis. The experience — which included providing aid to abused women, the homeless, individuals caught up in gangs, and others less fortunate — was profound enough for her to want to remain in the city for more than a decade.
“Working with the sisters, their volunteer program changed my life. It gave me a confidence and a competence that I do not believe I would have had had I not gone up there.”
A crucial part of Regehr’s job involved raising money for St. Mary’s Health Clinics, which provides free healthcare for low-income and uninsured residents of the Twin Cities. “What I learned there can be used here (at Thrive),” Regehr said. “I believe that health care is a basic human right and that everyone deserves good, affordable, accessible health care. That’s a big part of my job here, figuring out how to make our health care system more accessible.”
While thrilled to see a position of this sort open up in her hometown, she acknowledges the differences between Kansas and Minnesota in regards to health care. Specifically, she points to Minnesota’s decision to expand Medicaid where Kansas has refused.
The human costs of such policies have become clear to Regehr already. She recalls sitting with Georgia Masterson the previous day when a woman arrived in Thrive’s office seeking help acquiring health insurance. The woman works 50 hours a week, has a small son, and makes about $13,000 a year — a set of conditions which, in Kansas, renders her both ineligible for the Marketplace and outside the rescue of Medicaid.
Regehr was dismayed. “To sit here with this woman who works 50 hours a week and is doing everything she can to contribute and to be a good citizen — and she can’t get health insurance? It’s so frustrating!”

Regehr credits her parents with helping shape her instinct toward service. Her mother, especially, was involved in a number of volunteer organizations during her childhood and was always fully active in Lisse’s schooling. “I think without even knowing it, Mom and Dad taught me a lot by example. I don’t think they had to say much about it; you just watch it happen.”
But her sensitivity toward others was sharpened, too, during her years in Minneapolis. Regehr’s work placed her squarely in the inner city. “All of a sudden, you’re learning the everyday stresses that these people live with.”

The sting of having to leave friends behind in her transition comes up more than once in Regehr’s story. It’s a scenario with which she’s familiar.
Her father was a pilot in the Air Force, which meant the family — Lisse is the oldest of three — moved frequently during her childhood.
“Every summer we’d come home for a month. And so, although most military children don’t really have one place they can call home, we always had Iola.”
Middle school, she admits, was often hard. She attended three schools — in Florida, Texas, and Arizona — in three years. “I’d form these great friendships and I would think ‘I’m never going to make friends again.’ But then of course you do — that’s just what happens.”
“Luckily,” Regehr says, breaking off to note the obvious , “I’m a people person.”
 
It was family, though, that brought Regehr home this time. “My sister is back here, my niece and nephew, my grandpa is back here, my aunts and uncles are here.” Regehr’s younger brother, a helicopter pilot in Arizona, visits frequently.
“A lot of people don’t get to say that — that they want to live near their family and see their family so often. I know that we’re pretty lucky that we love each other that much and that we get along.”
Regehr admits she cried a lot during her final weeks in Minnesota. “These people meant so much to me. They were my family away from home, they looked out for me, they celebrated birthdays with me, they were my mentors. It was much more than leaving a work environment. It was leaving a home away from home.”
Does she think she can make similar connections working at Thrive?
Damaris Kunkler fields this one: “You can’t not make those connections; the work here forces you into everybody’s conversation on every corner.”
From what she’s seen so far, Regehr agrees. She becomes most animated when she talks about her hopes for her new job. She is grateful for the faith Executive Director David Toland has placed in her and the support she’s received from her new colleagues. She appreciates the goodwill from the community. And she says the new job offers variety in the way her old job didn’t.
But, most importantly, it is a position which will give her a chance to be of use to others, which alone should make her feel at home.
Regehr remembers her father finally making the decision to return to Iola. “When we moved back, one of the things he really wanted to do was become a county commissioner, and he did that. He wanted to do it because he saw a lot of things in the community that he thought he could help with. He wanted to come back to his hometown and do whatever he could to make it better.”
Like father, like daughter.