An absolute joy to see the center grow

Alice Ann Johnston and her young family were fairly new to Lawrence when a friend asked her if she would be interested in serving on the board at the Bert Nash Center.

“We had moved here in 1983,” Johnston said. “I hadn’t even heard of Bert Nash before.” But she said yes to the invitation to join the board anyway.

“I knew that it was something important and that it would be something that I would enjoy being involved in,” Johnston said.

She joined the Bert Nash Governing Board in 1986. At that time, the Center was located on the second floor in the west wing of the old Lawrence Memorial Hospital, which was later torn down.

Over the next 30 years, Johnston spent much of that time as a volunteer board member at the Center. She went from knowing nothing about Bert Nash when she first joined the board to being recognized for her institutional memory of the Center. She was honored as board emerita in 1994.

“It has been an absolute joy to see the Center grow,” Johnston said.

Beth Ankerholz, the Bert Nash IT director, who has worked at Bert Nash for 29 years, has known Johnston her entire time she has been at the Center.

“On my third day of work when I started in 1989 as Sandra Shaw’s executive assistant, we had a governing board meeting at the newly opened Community Support Services building on Vermont Street. All of the board members impressed me with their knowledge of and commitment to the Bert Nash Center. But Johnston has always had a special place in my heart,” Ankerholz said. “She has a great sense of humor and I’m greeted with a warm hug at every event. It’s simply amazing that her commitment and hard work is as strong today as it was the day I met her.”

Johnston served on the Governing Board from 1986-1992 and was the chair in 1988. In 1999, she joined the Bert Nash Endowment Board and served until 2017. She was chair of the Endowment Board from 2007-2010.

“We didn’t even have an Endowment Board when I started,” Johnston said. “Up to that point, we had been dependent on grants. But Sandra Shaw (who was CEO at the time) knew if we just depended on grants we would be subject to the whims of the government and it would be hard to maintain the consistency of our programming, and she felt like we needed an endowment.”

An endowment for the Bert Nash Center was established in 1986 and the Endowment Board was formed in 1991. Johnston and Shaw, who joined Bert Nash in 1971 as director of Child and Family Services, became friends and

served together many years. In 1979, Shaw was appointed interim executive director at Bert Nash and then CEO, a position she held until her retirement in 2001.

“She was a good friend,” Johnston said. “Back in those days, we had our meetings in the evening and when I would leave the house to go to a meeting, my twin boys would say, ‘Well, tell Bert hello for us.’ And, I’d say I’ll do it. Sandra would get tickled when I would tell her that.”

Even though she went off the Endowment Board in 2017, Johnston is an emeritus member of the board.

“David (Johnson, former Bert Nash CEO) used to say I couldn’t resign from the board because I was the history of Bert Nash,” Johnston said.

During her decades-long involvement with the Center, Johnston witnessed a lot of positive changes at Bert Nash as well as how the community treats mental health.

“I feel like I was there during a time when Bert Nash started to become a really viable institution in Douglas County,” Johnston said. “There used to be a stigma about going to Bert Nash. We’ve made a lot of progress in that regard. We’ve become the choice for mental health services in Douglas County and the community. The name Bert Nash is very well respected, not just in this community but across the state.”