Jason Gillette

Guiding conversations with community leaders.

In this podcast, we'll explore the human journey of leaders, their stories of humility, triumph, roadblocks, and lessons learned. Come join us as we journey together and uncover the questions you've always wanted to know. This podcast is brought to you by the Gilbert Chamber of Commerce, providing resources, connections and belonging for business professionals and modern moments.

An event and meeting venue in the heart of Gilbert. It's a beautiful day. It's gorgeous outside, actually. And we have an amazing guest with us today.

Special guest today. This guest grew up in Los Angeles and became a US Marine in his late teens, where he served in Entering Freedom and Iraqi Freedom and found a passion for humanitarian efforts. After his service, he went on to work for three Fortune 500 companies and then found an opportunity to pursue his passion for public health as a master trainer to promote community health models. His work includes updates to the state's physical education standards and healthier eating programs in school. My children, thank you so much. Today, he is the CEO of Guild Health Group. He is a family man with a wife, an adult son who's attending college in Minnesota, and two dogs who bring him great joy. Please welcome a Gilbert leadership graduate, Jason Gillette.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much.

Which Gilbert leadership class are you?

Class 30.

30.

They say the dirty 30 is what they.

25 tends to get a little bit of dirt, too. But, hey, I'll give it the 30. We'll get that.

I'm class 21, the class of the century. So I don't know how you got.

I mean, I don't know. I got my own comments, but they're probably not appropriate for right now.

So instead, you know what we should do?

We should just say 30.

We should do rapid fire.

Rapid fire. Here we go.

Would you rather find your dream job or win the lottery?

Dream job.

What's your guilty pleasure?

Video games.

Yes.

Ooh. Would you rather host a party for all of your friends or enjoy dinner.

For two and dinner for two?

I'm not sure I want to know this, but it says what's on your nightstand.

A book, my charger, and some Kleenex.

Keep it simple.

There you go.

Last TV show you binged.

Ooh, I think it was. Wait, wait, wait, wait. It was the Mandalorian. Yes.

It's fun. Okay, fill in the blank. Success is growth.

What song makes you smile?

I love. There's a song by Anita Baker. See the rapture of love. Me and my. My wife, we love that song. Yeah, it's corny.

Are you more cautious or Bold.

Bold.

I would guess that, yeah.

What's your favorite rainy day activity?

Watching the rain, for sure.

Well, what are you doing in Arizona, man?

I know, right? I took the wrong turn in Albuquerque.

What is one thing you are grateful for?

I am grateful for my son. He's taught me quite a bit over the years.

I love that.

Yeah.

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Well, I've loved the opportunity to get to know you through Gilbert leadership and even more as we get to read more about you and learn about what it looked like for you growing up and what shaped you. So let's take us back there. Grew up in Los Angeles. What did childhood look like for you?

Well, childhood was interesting. I grew up homeless when I was in Los Angeles. We grew up in South Central. My older brother and my younger sister, we. My mother was struggling with a lot of addiction and things like that, and so we really forged quite often until we couldn't. We had no other place to do but go. But I think the child care services took us around, around five years old and separated us. And so my childhood was just constant dependent upon others to take care of me, and it was episodic at best. You found that trust was something that you believed in but never really saw, often growing up where I grew up. And so my childhood was one that tested just who I wanted to be. I wasn't given much of an opportunity to. To go further than what I was given. And I realized that it had to be me. I had to make some decision at some point. I didn't know that that was my choice in life at 5, 6 years old, but. Right.

That would have been weird if you did.

Right. You know, it's like, you know, here's the manual, and I'm choosing to do something else. And so I. You're surrounded by fear a lot. Where I grew up, there was a lot of fear, and it expressed itself in anger and hopelessness. You saw a lot of that. I think that as I gotten older, my childhood gave me lessons on remembering that I can choose. I get to choose. No matter how horrible the situation is, I still get to choose. And that's. That's what that frame that gave Me, when I was a kid is just, you still get to choose. I mean, things aren't exactly beautiful. You don't have all the tools to make it, but unfortunately, you still have to make a choice.

Is there an individual who helped you to see that? That's a pretty large reckoning for a child. Did you get there on your own or.

Um, yeah, I. I saw. You know, sometimes the greatest teacher, if not one individual. It's sometimes situations, learning what not to do. You get to see sometimes what fear demonstrates itself as in your community, and you can make a decision. Do I want to make that my life habit, or do I want to do something different? And I think one of the strangest things I've learned is that you can't run away from your past, but you can definitely learn from it, and you want to run towards it because it gives you some context into who you are and why you see the things you see and why you see them that way. I learned that if I did the exact opposite of what I saw, I would get a different outcome. And so I believe that I didn't really have a framework to say I could prove it, but I knew that if the people around me were doing one thing, then I felt it was if I wanted to do something different, I had to do something different than what they did. And so I had to make a concerted effort as a kid to do the exact opposite of what I saw. And oftentimes that couldn't give you a complex because then you associate negativity with what you are raised around, and that's not entirely true either.

Yeah.

And so my life as a youngster was really about understanding and building a path that I could be happy with. And that gave me the peace that I always looked for.

What were schools like for you? Did you have many opportunities there or was that like.

Well, we moved quite often. We would move, I think, every 18 months. And because we had. We were in. So we were Section 8, and so we didn't. We. Every year they had to do an inspection and sometimes they wouldn't go as well. And so we prepared to move quite often. And so school was challenged because I was a shy kid and I didn't know how to make friends because, you know, you move so often, you're not really, you know, you don't build that skill very easily. You learn how to become friends with yourself very easily in some regards. And so I think that I learned that school, for me, was a challenge. I knew I was smart, but I just didn't have the structure, I didn't have the environment to really demonstrate that. And so school was always just a space where I got to eat and sometimes I got to see some of my friends that I would see on the bus. Um, but I loved school. I just never knew how to interact with it because it was such a foreign substance in a sense, some foreign environment for me oftentimes.

All right, so then post school, what was our transition?

So that was 18 to 17 years old. I'm graduating high school and you don't know what to do. You're oftentimes, I mean, my brother joined the Marines before I. And when he, when I graduated high school, he was already in the Marines. And so I didn't know what else to do. I didn't have like, you know, these litany of options. And it wasn't a lot of education on, hey, you could do this or you could do that. It was, you know, the military or get a job. And I didn't, you know, I didn't know what job to get. And, you know, what does a 17 year old kid know about building a career? Right. And so I joined the Marines in 1999, right after high school. And that was, that was, that was an incredible experience. I learned really quickly that there was, it was me. I had to depend on me. And then the Marines, they taught you very quickly how to learn how to be self reliant and also learn how to work within a group. So there was a lot of lessons learned in that moment.

Yeah, absolutely.

And talk about your journey, you know, some of the greatest lessons through your service and some of the experiences that you had.

Oh, man. Yeah. You know, one of my greatest moments, I remember we were in boot camp and we had been, you know, it's 13 weeks and so, so we're getting towards the end and I see we're doing this hike, I think it's like a 17 mile hike in the middle of Camp Pendleton. And I see a streetlight. Just imagine I haven't seen a street light in like two and a half months or a car or a window or anything like that. And so I sit at this gate looking outside of Camp Pendleton and I just watched the streetlight go from yellow to green to red. And it was the most calming space of my life. I couldn't imagine something so, you know, humbling. Right. Just a streetlight. That's all I needed to see, to know that there was a reality outside of what I was going through. And that would, that moment gave me context that I could be a Marine. But it didn't mean that I didn't have to be. I didn't have to really embrace this ideology that was alone like that. There was a world out there still inside of California and San Diego. I just didn't see it. I hadn't seen anyone. It was really great to see me. I mean, just to bring you back home, like, there is a world out there. And it kind of shaped the way I saw the rest of my training. So it gave me the strength to say, okay, I can get through this. This is. There's a. There's an end to this too. Right. Because those folks that were in that street area, they. They had houses and homes, and so their lives continued. So it was one of those spaces where I really appreciated that.

That's amazing. I've never been in the military, so I respect and appreciate all that you have gone through. But I've heard many tell me that through their journeys, they have a lot of mentors that pop up in their career. Anybody come to mind for you?

Oh, absolutely. So Gunnery Sergeant Wallace was. Was a great mentor of mine. He held me to a high standard, and I really appreciated that because I didn't know how that looked. I didn't know what it meant to be held to a standard that was greater than what you thought you could do. And you always want someone to believe in you. And I think that what I learned was that it's great for you to draw on people's energy when they believe in you. And he always asked me to give more, and he would always say, what's next? And that was something I took with me for the rest of my career. I made Sargent in three years, and then he said, what's next? And I'm like, I don't know. And he just kept asking me to make that commitment to myself, to ask, what's next? What is next? And so it just gave me. It gave me a sense of accomplishment, but then also planning for what is next.

And so in your time in the service, you found your passion for some humanitarian efforts?

I did, yeah.

Share a little bit about that experience.

We had a chance to volunteer at the Special Olympics in Mississippi one year when I was in training. We were going through class or school and just being able to help other people. We did some humanitarian work in East Timor as well. During some of our campaigns. We helped folks across the country, across the world, do some just in any way. And it was one of the most rewarding feelings to help people. And I've taken that with Me, ever since I've gotten out of the military, I just love to help people. And you would never think that the Marines or the branch that imbues that level of help, but it was in everything we did. We helped people, and that was. That was something you didn't see often, but we did a lot of work helping other people, just making sure that we were there and people felt safe around us. And so I really appreciated that opportunity to show that helping is just as powerful as fighting. Matter of fact, you can actually help and do a little bit more by helping others. And so I really take that with me, and I ask everyone I come in contact with, how can I help? And it's something that some people just. They'll look at me crazy and keep going about their business. But then some people are like, oh, well, actually, I could use your help. And I've learned that you can learn a lot more about people and you can learn a lot more about yourself by just offering to help someone else.

I think it's fantastic how the parallels here, where you grew up, where you were on the opposite side, you were in fear, and now you're on the side where people are finding the confidence and trust in you and your path. Isn't that crazy?

You know, it is. I think that some of the greatest leaders were our best followers, right? It's the people who understood what it meant to need help and what it meant to show up for somebody else, or even the lack of knowing what it means for someone to show up for you. And so I know what it feels like. And so now I'm like, I want to be there for as many things and as many people as I can, because I know what it feels like when you. When no one's there for you, when you don't have that calvary coming in and what. You know, to dignify people as well when you help them, don't do it in a sense that, oh, I'm doing something of my abundance to give to you, but I get a chance to help someone else, and that's an honor.

I think that's a really big point as well.

So after the military, you transitioned into these companies then, right? Because it says in your bio Here you had three Fortune 500 companies you were part of. Talk about that journey there a bit.

Oh, yeah, that's. So I. When I got out of the Marines, I'm like, okay, great. I'm a veteran. I'm getting a job, a good job, and, you know, we're going to. Everything's going to be okay. And it didn't quite work out that way. I went to college, asu. Go Devils. And I got my degree, and I'm like, okay, great. Now I have a degree. I'm a veteran. I'm good. And that wasn't the case either. And so I went through a stretch of trying to find out what I wanted to do. And you can't make a job out of helping people. I guess if you don't have a doctorate degree or an MD degree or nurse, those are the helpers. You can't. And so I thought to myself, how do I help in the healthcare space without the clinical background? And so public health is one of those areas where we looked at systems and we looked at processes, and we looked at what made communities strong and what made them not so strong. We also found out that there were policies that made some of these things happen. We saw that there were redlining that made communities weak and desolate. And so we saw how public health was part policy, part community, part programming, part all these things. And it was also really about connecting and helping people. So I was like, that's for me. And so before that, though, they are not going to hire you without any type of experience. So I had to get the only job I could get. And so I started in sales at Nordstrom's, and I was selling women's shoes. And I remember almost getting fired because I couldn't smile. I just got back from my. From Iraq, and I was, you know, holding shoes for a customer, and I had this, like, serious look on my face, like, this guy's crazy.

Had nothing to do with the feet smell, huh?

It was like. You know, I remember my boss pulling me aside and was like, hey, man, if I need you to smile, like, this is Nordstrom. Like, I'm gonna need you to smile. I'm gonna have to let you go. And I was like, oh, crap, what am I gonna do? And so I had to make a decision, like, who am I gonna be? Like, am I gonna. And so I figured it out, put on a smile, and I started selling shoes and doing pretty well. And then I went to Chase. I was at JPMorgan Chase, doing banking there. And I learned how to connect with people. So I learned a little bit about connecting and how to connect with people over the years. And then I got to FedEx. And so that was my opportunity for me to go back to school. And I really took the advantage of bettering myself in that opportunity. It was a great company to work for. I learned that, you know, health was my thing and sales was not my thing. You know, I'm a nice person, not a good salesperson. I was. I was. There was two different things. And so then I resigned from FedEx and went to school, grabbed my degree, and then started my public health career.

And in that career, you've. You've worked on several initiatives. What are some that you're most proud of or that you feel have really influenced change?

Oh, man. So we had a chance to develop a fatality review board, and we were able to put together a process for collecting data that would allow us to find gaps in some of the services and the care that these folks who had overdosed received. And we were able to identify through the data that there were practices and policies that we could change that would actually save someone's life. And so that was something I'm still very proud of. I'm also very proud of our work we did with COVID We were able to help Gila county with their operations and get over 50% of their population vaccinated before anyone else in the country. And so we were really proud of how we worked together with the National Guard and was able to put together a very strong process that allowed for some 25,000 people to get vaccinated during COVID and save lives in that capacity. So we're really proud of those two accomplishments so far.

Yeah, that's awesome. So this other. This new organization, the Guild Health Group, talk to me about how that bubbled up. I mean, obviously the degree and all that, but where did it come from?

You know, it came from I wanted to do something great. I really wanted to make an impact in. In public health in a way that I could measure and say, okay, well, it was this way before and after we made some interventions and some initiatives, we changed and made an impact. And so I'm big on measurement, and so I wanted to see public health do all that it could do. You know, I think it was. It's not as exciting. People don't really care too much about public health until you really understand how complex it is and how much goes into understanding how you develop cities, systems and processes to make communities grow and make them thrive. And so there's a ton of research on public health models like the Blue Zones and some other really neat approaches to building healthy communities. And so Guild Health Group was. Was. Was built out of the idea that we wanted to do something great. We want to inspire healthy and safe communities all over the world. And so we want to make sure that Organizations are able to respond. Communities are able to respond. They have public health acumen. Right. They understand that their community is a part of this public health process. And so Guild Health Group was a byproduct of wanting to do something that measurably made our communities better. And so we constantly try to reinvent ourselves as an evaluation firm, as an emergency, emergency response firm, to make sure that we're doing what we can to make sure everyone is informed and inspired to work together. And that's really where Guild Health Group came from.

From that perspective, what are some, or maybe one individual challenge that you think we need to overcome as a greater community or maybe even a society?

You know, that's a great question. I would say it's twofold. We have to. We have to understand what community is, and I think we should have a much more active role in defining that. We are a community where we come together. And I think that the intersectionalities of our. Of our community are so diverse that we should. We should honor that. I think that we are only different in our minds. And I think once we understand that public health and has. Has. Is. Is just as much about building healthy, resilient communities for everyone as it is about looking at how the longevity of communities last. Like, how do we build healthy systems where we can get access to care or access to education, access to safe and affordable housing, things like that. And I think that understanding that we are like. I think it's the adage, high tide rises all ships when we can. When we. When we look at it from that perspective, that's when public health works at its best. There is no way to raise the tide on one side and neglect it. It doesn't work that way. And I think that sometimes it looks like we try to do that and it doesn't work. Yeah.

Okay, so I'm going to ask you the question that your. Your mentor in the military asks you. What's next, man?

Well, we are expanding. We just expanded into Illinois, and we're going into Colorado now to expand our services and really meet. Our goal now is to build processes and systems. We have an assessment that we're finalizing that'll help us understand what the needs are at a macro level and also at a micro level from the individual perspective. So we are defining new ways of assessing our communities. We're looking at ways to bring safety to the forefront of all of our minds. And so we started a podcast that'll start next year that looks at how do we bring the stories of emergency managers and Safety response to everyone's. Everyone's doorstep and say, hey, like, this is what's happening and this is how we do it.

What's that podcast gonna be called?

It's gonna be called the Guild. I know, it's kind of edgy, isn't it?

Hey, I don't have no idea how you got it, but I like it. I like it.

Thank you very much. I appreciate it. It's completely random, isn't it?

And how about you? So you and your wife are now empty nesters.

I know, man, I know.

It's.

How's that happen so fast, right?

You know what? It's, you know, I have no idea. Like, I think about, I see, I look at pictures of my son when he was just, you know, little, and I'm like, what is he doing in college? Like, and it's, you know, but at the same time, I'm so proud of him, you know, he has continued to ask himself the question, what's next? He just made the Carlton baseball team and he's. He. I didn't even expect that. But he's continuing to push himself into being the best version of him that he can be. And that's, as a dad, that's all I really can ask. I just want you to be the best version of you can be. I don't really care what else that looks like. Just continue to be your best. And so I encourage that to him and to myself and to everyone that I come in contact with because we deserve that. We really do.

Well, clearly he has a great mentor in you, so that's awesome that his chapters are going well for him. That's great.

Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm honored. Thank you.

Well, I appreciate you and all the good you continue to do for the community. You're accomplishing great things and I love to learn more about your journey today and just continue to watch you flourish.

Thank you, Sarah. Always an honor. Such an honor. Thank you very much for the time.

This has been a fantastic conversation, a great journey, very inspiring story. And if you like this, like, I know you do, sign up so you can get all these great episodes coming to you. Thank you for being part of our conversation today and we hope to hear pretty soon. Guiding conversations with community leaders.

Ben, let me ask you a question. How do you see other community members being involved in this podcast?

This is going to be a great opportunity for so many people in the community to have a chance to be heard if they want to tell their story or if they just want to be part of this journey with us and help sponsor it in a way that helps bring more people to the table with us. So I think there's many opportunities at hand whether you want to again be on the show. Reach out to us. Let us know what your story is and how you think you could be part of it. We'd love to hear from you. Reach out, let us know, and we'll see if we can make that connection.

Sam.