By Dan McCue
Staff Writer

S. Guilds Hollowell Jr. returned to his hometown on a mission.

A native Charlestonian, Hollowell left South Carolina in 1979 to attend Bowdoin College in Maine and, after E.F. Hutton bought the futures trading business he founded between classes, he stayed on in chilly New England.

In the years since, Hollowell has been first vice president of E.F. Hutton, senior vice president of Prudential Securities and founder and president of communications firm Guilds Hollowell & Associates.

But despite his successes in the for-profit arena, Hollowell left it behind to become the

community development program manager for Training and Development Corp. of Millinocket, Maine. And it was that latter role that ultimately got him thinking about coming home.

“Millinocket was one of several old mill towns in Maine that were in trouble; over the years there had been a progression of mills that were shutting down. What we were doing was fighting for the underdog,” Hollowell said.

“My job wasn’t so much economic development as developing a blueprint for community development for the Millinocket and Katahdin regions of Maine,” he said. “You have to figure out who you are before you try to figure out where you want to go.”

Through Hollowell’s efforts, Training and Development Corp. worked to strengthen the community and create a more sustainable economy.

One of the ways it did so was to establish a community-owned electric generation facility that turned pulp by products into power. The plant, which became operational in 2006, provides power to several industrial customers at 50% the current grid rate.

Hollowell also helped create a community-owned endowment fund to support long-term development.

As these projects matured, Hollowell began looking for his next challenge. It was then that he became acquainted with Charleston-based CommuniCare.

Established 10 years ago, CommuniCare provides health and dental care to the state’s estimated 600,000 working poor, those in the Palmetto state who receive a paycheck but have no medical or dental insurance and rely on hospital emergency rooms for primary care.

The late Dr. Bart Barone, a neurosurgeon and CommuniCare founder, envisioned creating a single source through which doctors, facilities and pharmaceutical companies could donate their resources. Patients in need of free care would have a place to turn for help.

So successful has the not-for-profit program been that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has included it in its Best Practices Initiative, calling it a model for encouraging learning and collaboration in public health.

Today, Dr. Rudolph B. Rustin, Baron’s stepson, is chairman of CommuniCare’s board of directors. More than 2,000 volunteer doctors, physician assistants, pharmacists and dentists participate in the program.

But, as with all nonprofits, there is a constant need to refill the basket of the most easily used-up of resources: donations.

After a discussion with Rustin, Hollowell quickly found his next calling. This past summer he returned to Charleston to roll up his sleeves and get busy helping CommuniCare. He’ll kick off the capital campaign on Nov. 3.

“The challenge (faced by) not-for-profits, and particularly not-for-profits that are located in areas or regions that are not typically on the radar of grant-making foundations, is finding that place where its board’s passion for what it does intersects with the people in a position to give,” Hollowell said.

“Let’s face it, if you ask someone to participate in a golf event and talk about your program, they want to play golf with Tiger Woods, not Guilds Hollowell. So the first thing I said to the CommuniCare board was, ‘if you want to attract the attention of the big, national foundations, you need to get the heavy hitters in Charleston and South Carolina involved.”

When seeking the support of foundations, the first question invariably asked is, “Does everybody in your community—meaning the movers and shakers—know about it?” he said.

The other issue that needs to be recognized by not-for-profits that haven’t been drawing funds from the pool of national foundations is that there’s a big difference between “charity” and “philanthropy,” Hollowell said.

“The South, as generous as it is, hasn’t looked as hard as it needs to at philanthropy. Charity addresses an immediate need, but most of the time doesn’t address the underlying issue,” he explained. “Philanthropy, in effect, is making an investment to effect change.

When he speaks of CommuniCare, Hollowell exhibits a true advocate’s fervor, a fervor he hopes will ultimately help manifest some significant foundation support for CommuniCare.

“But first I have to get the message to a lot of successful businesspeople that if you want thing to happen differently, if you don’t want this class of working South Carolinians to  have to continue to make the choice between feeding their families and buying medication, then you have to change some stuff,” he said.

Once organizations outline the situation to their audience, he said, then they can suggest ways it might be changed.

“Then you add, ‘But we’ll need some money.’ And hopefully, by that point, they’ll be ready to ask, ‘How much?’” Hollowell said.

While Hollowell’s immediate concern is CommuniCare, he said, there are potential fruits that may be borne of his outreach and foundation strategy that extend beyond health care.

“Once you get national foundations to establish a foothold here, they’re not going to have blinders on, they’re going to start looking around for other opportunities to effect change,” he said.

“In the long run, and based upon what I experienced firsthand in Maine, if we can be successful in this, I can certainly see foundation involvement spreading to economic development entities and the state’s efforts to develop new economic clusters and new economic development here.”

Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@setcommedia.com.

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