Touching Lives Award

Mike provided these comments upon receiving the 2025 Touching Lives Award from Horizon Home Care & Hospice on March 8, 2025.

Thank you.  To Horizon – Colleen, Randy, Marcy, George and all of you involved in providing this recognition please accept my great appreciation.

You know it’s the middle one. For many of us with an odd number of kids, it’s that middle one. The one that provides a different perspective, maybe a greater challenge, or in this case more in-depth wisdom.  Our middle daughter is serving as a peace corps volunteer in rural Ghana, choosing to live in a deeply economically impoverished community journeying alongside and with her new friends to find a better way forward.  The African wisdom she shares these days: “is it impossible or is it just difficult.”

In the early days of AIDS, it certainly seemed impossible – unchecked new infections and certain death.  Amidst this harsh reality we found the inspiration to do the impossible: reduce new infections by 80%, achieve the very best outcomes in America right here is Wisconsin, and support people with HIV who now can live a normal life expectancy.  Yes, we saved thousands upon thousands of lives. 

I am grateful for the opportunity to have contributed to this success and want to also honor and thank friends, leaders, staff, volunteers, donors, policy makers and many others who stepped forward in those impossible days and helped create a way forward that simply didn’t exist.  Chief among them, my wife Donna who joins us here tonight and who made three decades of contributions and sacrifices to help make the impossible, possible.

“Is it impossible or just difficult,” is what many face today.  I hear it in my work throughout the country, seemingly in every conversation.  As we stack one unprecedented time upon another upon another; as one change is rapidly surpassed by the next only to be quickly surpassed by the following one – where do we find inspiration today like what we found in the early dark days of AIDS.

The answer for that inspiration is at hand tonight – right here amongst us – its Horizon.

• The Horizon inspiration of two competitors – Froedtert and Ascension setting aside whatever it may be and coming together to form a partnership lasting decades and helping people in the time of their greatest need.  Think how unusual, how powerful, how meaningful it has been for those two organizations to join together. Let us be inspired from their example to build bridges amidst the things that separate us.

• The Horizon inspiration of treating people with dignity, with humanity. All people, meaning everyone, without exception. Period. Asking how to support them in the most difficult of times, coming to understand their needs, and working tirelessly to meet them.  That is what Horizon and its hundreds of staff do every day – with kindness and compassion, with help and with hope. Let us be inspired by Horizon to display that dignity and that humanity throughout our lives.

As we move through these unprecedented times of great change, tumultuous as they may be, and we try to move from the impossible to the difficult let us be inspired by the work and lessons of Horizon – true unity, true dignity, true humanity – and join with them offering our time and our talents and our treasure not just at this wonderful annual party but throughout the year.  Thank you.

Reach out today!  (414) 899-8485 or mike@mikegiffordconsulting.com

Previous Blogs