Linda Arnold--Children's Hospital Foundation--2003

Linda Arnold--OSF Children's Hospital Foundation--2003

In 2002, Haitian Hearts raised and donated 445,000 dollars to Children’s Hospital of Illinois (CHOI). However, during 2003, Haitian Hearts received no donor list from CHOI and no money came in from the OSF offices for Haitian Hearts. Haitian Hearts had become a not-for-profit 501.c.3 organization in October of 2002 because we could not trust OSF any longer.

During the fall of 2003, Anne Wagenbach, Haitian Hearts Coordinator, went to OSF Foundation in downtown Peoria and spoke to a secretary who told Anne that she would send Haitian Hearts our donor list. In other words, the names of everyone who had donated to Haitian Hearts or CHOI/Haitian Hearts during 2003 would be sent to Anne so we could see who to thank for their donations. The kids in Haiti were and are very dependent on these funds to help obtain their passports and visas, medication, American Airlines flights to the United States, and heart surgery.

Weeks went by and Anne did not receive the donor list from OSF Foundation. This seemed very wrong for a 1.6 billion dollar industry to withhold from Haitian Hearts money and our donor list. In the meantime, OSF-CHOI sent literature to people seeking funds for CHOI using our donor lists.

One afternoon I drove to the OSF-Foundation office in downtown Peoria and I went to the secretary that Anne had spoken with. We visited in her office and she said she would print out the donor list for me. She also told me that she had placed the donor list in the outgoing mail in the Foundation office when Anne had asked for it weeks before.  As I sat in her office, when she was retrieving the Haitian Hearts donor list off her computer, Linda Arnold walked in. 

Linda is a Director of the Foundation office. Several years before, just after Linda arrived in Peoria, she constructed a letter for me to sign that said that Haitian Hearts had donated 300,000 dollars to CHOI. I told her we had raised much more than that. So she had her secretary change the figure to 400,000 dollars. I refused to sign this also. At that point, I told Linda that we had raised at least 600,000 dollars for CHOI, so she did the letter again with this figure, and I signed it. I wondered about Linda after this. Either her record keeping was very sloppy or it was a trick. (I knew OSF had no idea what they were talking about in January, 2003 while I was picketing the medical center, when they told the Journal Star that Haitian Hearts owed OSF...partially due to my experiences with Linda Arnold.)

In the Foundation office that day in the fall of 2003, Linda told me that I could leave and that they would mail me the donor list for 2003. I told her that it would be no problem for me to stay since it was being brought up on the computer right then. Just when the secretary was to print the donor list out, the printer wouldn’t work for some reason. Linda told me that I should leave or she would call hospital security. I told her to go ahead and call security. I wasn’t doing anything wrong and had been invited to come in by her secretary who was attempting to print our donor list. Also, Linda knew that the Rotary Club North official had called me and let me know that she had “adamantly requested” that he send monies that was dedicated to Haitian Hearts to her instead. He refused to do so and told me, “John, if I would have done this, you would have never seen this money.” 

When I told Linda to "go ahead and call security", her eyes glazed over and she froze. She didn’t call security but told her secretary to go home and “take care of her babies”. I knew the secretary had no babies at home. However, her secretary was afraid of Linda and told me she was leaving. 

So I left the Foundation office, too. 

This is what OSF Children's Hospital of Illinois Foundation had devolved to in 2003. 

Haitian Hearts never did get a donor list that year from the general public and we have received none since. However, at the end of 2003, OSF Foundation turned over a check from OSF, signed by Keith Steffen, to Haitian Hearts for $8,343.80. Where did this money come from and why did OSF cash the checks that came to Haitian Hearts? It was not their money.

OSF was just bullying us and I believe that we would never have seen this money if we had not gone to Foundation in the fall of 2003 and confronted Linda Arnold. We never knew who to thank for the donations and have no idea if OSF gave us what they should have. (It seems odd that Haitian Hearts contributions to CHOI/Haitian Hearts would fall from almost one-half million dollars in 2002, to $8,343.80 in 2003.) 

The ultimate people that suffer for games like this are the Haitian children with heart problems that need to come to the United States for heart surgery.  

On January 15, 2004 Haitian Hearts met with a representative of the Charitable Trust Division of the Attorney General’s Office in Springfield to discuss OSF and their financial practices.