faith! - Anna Saunders
Anna Saunders’ home church in San Antonio, Texas, is named Reconciliation Episcopal Church.
The parish’s unusual name is rooted in an understanding about life – that we encounter many moments in our lives when we must reconcile ourselves. It may be reconciliation with a parent, a spouse, a friend or a stranger. This explanation is provided in a church history account from Anna’s maternal grandfather, the Rev. Joe Brown, Reconciliation’s founding rector.
“The parish had to decide whether they would be called ‘The Reconciliation’ or ‘Reconciliation.’ They decided on the latter as it would be more inclusive: reconciliation between God and man; between spouses; between parent and child; different ideologies; among varying races; governments, etc.,” Brown writes.
Something about the parish’s name still resonates with Anna and the work she does with Prisma Health, where she is a development officer for the hospital’s foundation, Prisma Health Midlands Foundation.
“I don’t know if my faith drove where I ended up, but certainly, now, I take it with me to my job, and it lends itself nicely,” Anna said. “My role is essentially connecting people who want to give back to our hospitals.”
This could come in the form of a family who has lost a loved one to cancer; or parents whose newborn twins spend their first weeks of life in the NICU; or of community members concerned about the needs of the less fortunate during a pandemic.
This is the type of work that the foundation sponsors. “It’s all about people who have been through something and want to make the best of that,” she said. “They are not coming to us because they have to or they need something. They are coming to us because they desire to be a part of something bigger than themselves.”
Life as teacher
Anna and her husband Doug, both 38 and members of St. Martin’s since 2012, have their own experience with the role a hospital can play in a family.
When the youngest of their three boys, Thomas, was born early a little over a year ago, the couple learned firsthand about the miraculous work of a neonatal intensive care unit. Thomas spent six weeks in the NICU at Prisma Health Baptist.
“That is a very vulnerable place to be,” Anna said. “When you have no choice but to hand your child off to this team of experts who are so good at what they do. I knew some of those people, but for them to actually be fully responsible for my child’s first few weeks of life is…humbling.”
Anna’s husband Doug learned about the vulnerability one can feel in a hospital early in his life, too. He lost his father, the late Bill Saunders, to pancreatic cancer when he was a junior in high school.
“Now at least a third of my time is spent raising funds for our cancer program,” Anna said. That is satisfying because, while she never had the chance to meet her father-in-law, she is able to focus some of her work and some of their personal giving in honor of what Doug’s family endured. “It means a lot to me…and to Doug, too,” she said.
Joy in the helping
The work also resonates with Anna’s foundational lessons about faith. Anna defines herself as having come from a family of “helpers.” Her father was a pediatrician. Her mother a librarian. The theme of her parent’s lives and their parenting was that “we’re here to serve.” Whether it be childhood memories of Sundays in Reconciliation Episcopal Church twirling her dress over the parish hall vent with her friends, attending Vacation Bible School, summer church camp or youth group ski trips, the message always was that life is about reaching beyond the self.
Because of this, Anna’s work today feels like a natural fit. She came to it through other jobs with nonprofits, where she was seeking to live out this ethos of helping that had been steeped in her, unknowingly perhaps, since childhood. One organization she worked for in Charlotte helped families in need connect with high-quality childcare. She was specifically charged with reaching out to Spanish-speaking families in Mecklenburg County. The role allowed her to use the Spanish she had learned growing up in San Antonio and after having studied in Spain while a student at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem.
Quality childcare “is such a necessity, and when you don’t have it, that is a real barrier,” she said. Having the support of her mother-in-law, Jeannie Saunders, with their family’s childcare throughout the pandemic has made Anna even more acutely aware of how important this need is.
Early in her career, Anna found herself enjoying telling the stories of the organizations she worked for, which led her to enroll in the Master’s in Mass Communications program at the University of South Carolina from 2007-08. Through the MMC program, she took part in a practicum at what was then the Palmetto Health Foundation. She was hired a year later, initially serving as events coordinator, and then moving into the development officer role in 2013. She is deeply influenced in her daily tasks by a quote from the Indian poet and Nobel prize winner Rabindranath Tagore. Her boss, Columbia philanthropist Samuel Tenenbaum, repeats the quote often in staff meetings.
Because of this, Anna’s work today feels like a natural fit. She came to it through other jobs with nonprofits, where she was seeking to live out this ethos of helping that had been steeped in her, unknowingly perhaps, since childhood. One organization she worked for in Charlotte helped families in need connect with high-quality childcare. She was specifically charged with reaching out to Spanish-speaking families in Mecklenburg County. The role allowed her to use the Spanish she had learned growing up in San Antonio and after having studied in Spain while a student at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem.
Quality childcare “is such a necessity, and when you don’t have it, that is a real barrier,” she said. Having the support of her mother-in-law, Jeannie Saunders, with their family’s childcare throughout the pandemic has made Anna even more acutely aware of how important this need is.
Early in her career, Anna found herself enjoying telling the stories of the organizations she worked for, which led her to enroll in the Master’s in Mass Communications program at the University of South Carolina from 2007-08. Through the MMC program, she took part in a practicum at what was then the Palmetto Health Foundation. She was hired a year later, initially serving as events coordinator, and then moving into the development officer role in 2013. She is deeply influenced in her daily tasks by a quote from the Indian poet and Nobel prize winner Rabindranath Tagore. Her boss, Columbia philanthropist Samuel Tenenbaum, repeats the quote often in staff meetings.
"I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I acted and behold, duty was joy,” Tagore wrote.
“That sums up my work. It resonates so much with things I get to do,” she said. “I really can’t imagine myself anywhere else.”
Anna Saunders and her husband Doug joined St. Martin’s in 2012. They have three sons, Billy, 7, Hardy, 5, and Thomas, 1.
