Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? Join the mailing list and receive more conversations like this in your inbox.
Walter Panzirer is a trustee of the Helmsley Charitable Trust, a global philanthropy. His work focuses on expanding access to healthcare in rural communities, an interest informed in part by his experience as a first responder. That background has shaped his perspective on the challenges rural healthcare systems face and the importance of ensuring communities have access to timely, effective care. In this conversation, Panzirer shares his thoughts on the role of philanthropy in addressing today’s healthcare challenges and his perspective on the future of rural healthcare.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Daily Yonder: What is the Helmsley Charitable Trust and what role has it played in rural healthcare even before your tenure as a trustee?
Walter Panzirer: The Helmsley Charitable Trust is a global philanthropy working to help people live better lives and create stronger, healthier futures for individuals and communities. We partner with people and organizations to invest in new ideas or research.
Leona Helmsley was my grandmother, and after her passing, she left nearly all of her estate to the Trust, appointing the Trustees and giving us full discretion to decide what purposes to support, with the sole directive to do good.
To guide those monumental decisions, we looked at the giving patterns of the Helmsleys throughout their lives. During their lifetimes, Harry and Leona Helmsley donated many millions of dollars to health-related efforts, which gave us a lot of ideas for the various health-focused programs we have today.
In my role as a Trustee, I advocated for the creation of, and now oversee, our Rural Healthcare program.
DY: What was your path to philanthropy for rural healthcare?
WP: The work I do now is largely informed by the experiences I had early on in my career. Working as a first responder in California and South Dakota, I witnessed firsthand the significant healthcare disparities between rural communities and urban areas. As a paramedic, firefighter, and law enforcement officer, I saw again and again how hard it could be for someone in a rural area to access timely, high-quality healthcare.
When I was named a trustee of the Helmsley Charitable Trust, I saw an immense opportunity for philanthropy to invest in better healthcare for Americans in rural communities. From the initial development of our Rural Healthcare Program to today, we remain committed to making sure a person’s ZIP code does not determine their access to quality healthcare.With this in mind, my job is to support my team in working with grantee organizations, providing vision, guidance, and the continued drive to understand the challenges healthcare institutions face in providing care in rural areas. This has included equipping healthcare providers with lifesaving technology, investing in telemedicine, and expanding access to behavioral health services, to name a few.
DY: How does the Helmsley Trust identify rural health programs, institutions, and initiatives to invest in?
WP: Building trust with our partners in the community is at the root of all of Helmsley’s work. Our rural healthcare team is based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and each person on the team has lived rural experience, something we believe is critical to understanding the unique goals of rural communities.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution for rural communities. We are always in dialogue with health systems to understand what they’re seeing firsthand, what they are trying to accomplish, and where there’s strong alignment with Helmsley’s priorities. We see our role as helping communities make their self-identified solutions a reality.
Sustainability is always at the forefront. Our grants have endpoints, and early on, we want to understand what it will take to sustain these projects once the grant ends. We understand the realities and recognize that rural hospitals and frontier hospitals have razor-thin margins. We never want to see a hospital offer a service, only to be forced to remove it a few years later because it could not be sustained.
DY: From a policy perspective, a lot is changing for rural healthcare these days. How does philanthropy, and the Helmsley Trust more specifically, fit into an evolving healthcare landscape?
WP: During any turbulent time in policy, what’s most valuable to the grantee is for philanthropy is to stay consistent and continue the work we set out to do.
At Helmsley, our approach to uncovering solutions doesn’t waver when policies shift or administrations change.
We continue to listen to the communities we operate in, to hear directly from those who know what they need best. That remains constant. Their needs may change, and it’s our responsibility to be a steady and responsive presence in those communities, especially during uncertain times.
DY: What misconceptions have you encountered about philanthropy in your work?
WP: The biggest misconception people might have about philanthropy is that we just write checks and walk away.
We seek to find solutions through our grantmaking, and it takes diligence and expertise to find the right project with the right partner at the right time. We invest in people; relationships are the foundation of our grantmaking. And we partner with organizations for the long term. We realized very early on that we’d need a local team with lived experience in the rural areas we planned to invest in. That’s why our rural healthcare team is based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
We understand rural challenges, and the team has worked to find solutions to rural healthcare problems others think can’t be solved. The team regularly travels across states and territories from Montana to the Northern Mariana Islands, speaking with hospital executives, doctors, and first responders to hear about their unique needs and challenges directly from the source.
Philanthropy can often act with more agility and speed than local or federal governments. We are lucky to be in a position to help transform care in communities with unconventional responses to the needs we come across.
DY: What are some of the biggest challenges in rural healthcare you have encountered? How is Helmsley Trust’s work addressing those challenges?
WP: Our goal is to improve access to quality healthcare, and sometimes what’s even more important than improving existing facilities and services is bringing new ones to communities that have been going without. That aspect of bringing healthcare close to home is what’s most fulfilling about my job.
Cancer care is a great example. Not only do cancer patients bear a financial cost for treatment, but many people in rural areas also face difficult decisions around traveling long distances to access care. So much so that in some cases, patients may forgo treatment rather than uproot their lives to drive hundreds of miles a day, or spend weeks away from home, just to receive treatment. The physically and emotionally exhausting process of cancer treatment is even more difficult when patients don’t have their regular support system. And many studies have shown that if treatment is not available locally, patients may be diagnosed at a later stage, receive treatment that is not optimal, or have a diminished quality of life.Our goal is to have everyone in the rural Upper Midwest be within a 90-mile drive of comprehensive cancer care. That’s why Helmsley has funded four new cancer care centers in South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana since 2016. One of the centers, at Intermountain Health Holy Rosary Hospital in Miles City, Montana, has saved patients and their families nearly 300,000 miles of driving since opening in 2024.
I believe that when people are given the chance to remain in their communities, alongside their loved ones, healing and recovery are accelerated. This is why local care is at the heart of all we do, whether it’s opening new medical centers where they didn’t exist before, increasing the emergency response radius of facilities, or investing in local medical residency programs that expand the pipeline of doctors in rural areas.
DY: What brings you hope these days? Are there any healthcare trends you are hearing about on the ground that are most promising to you and your team?
WP: I’m extremely optimistic about the use of telehealth in increasing access to mental health resources. Notably, we’ve seen how impactful this trend can be when it comes to emergency responses. One in every five 911 calls is related to someone experiencing a mental health emergency, but these calls often result in unnecessary hospitalization or jail holds, and law enforcement officers may lack the necessary training to manage these situations. Individuals in crisis deserve a better solution. That’s why I’ve been excited to see the role telehealth is beginning to play in these scenarios.
In 2021, we funded a pilot of Virtual Crisis Care, a program in South Dakota that enabled law enforcement to immediately connect people in crisis with behavioral health specialists using cellular service-enabled tablets. With this system, health professionals provided assessment, intervention, and stabilization. Best of all, individuals in crisis were able to stay home and receive follow-up care 86% of the time, and avoid unnecessary confinement in a hospital or prison.The more we can provide mental health resources, virtually or otherwise, to communities in rural areas, the more we can make enormous progress in not only destigmatizing the issue but in saving lives.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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The post Q&A: Walter Panzirer on Philanthropy and Rural Healthcare appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
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