“You don’t just say, ‘You take all of our policies and procedures.’ It’s a whole lot of listening, finding common ground, learning from each other and sharing of best practices.”
been responsible for the dayto-day operations of Creighton University Medical Center, where he has concentrated on building internal relationships to create one community from two—no small task, since there had been very little communication between the two staffs prior to the transition date. “You don’t just say, ‘You take all of our policies and procedures,’” he says. “It’s a whole lot of listening, finding common ground, learning from each other and sharing of best practices.” It helps that the two organizations, Alegent and Creighton, are rooted in Catholic traditions—Sisters of Mercy and Jesuit, respectively—and that their values line up with Nokels’, which were shaped by the Benedictines. “Their values are consistent with my own: integrity, respect, compassion, stewardship,” he says. The internal relationship-building will spread outward to better serve some of Omaha’s neediest in the east side of the city where Creighton is situated. That also squares with Nokels’ values. “Looking out for others who may not have the resources is also what attracted me to nonprofit health care,” says Nokels, who spent five years working at St. Cloud Hospital before moving to Omaha in 1992 with his wife, Dawn. There he has found satisfaction in raising a family (their children are now 16 and 20 years old), providing health care and contributing what he can to the community. That also includes advocacy for those who work in his hospitals, which can be dangerous places. After a patient assaulted one of the hospital staff, Nokels worked with state senators to introduce and pass legislation that made such attacks against health care workers a felony. “At Saint John’s, there was the sense that you had to give back to the community,” he says. “That has stayed with me.”
Marty McCaslin ’84 North Omaha Baseball Initiative Founder To Marty McCaslin, when he arrived on campus from Omaha, the letters IOGD on the Quad tower spelled SJU: “In omnibus glorificetur Deus—‘that in all things God may be glorified.’ That stuck with me because it was my first
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exposure to the Benedictines, but it was consistent with what I’d seen through the Jesuits and my family history.” Jesuit schools he attended and his own family, where his father, a physician “who probably did more pro bono work than work he got paid for,” always stressed the value of service. The Benedictines added a twist with the notion that a community is comprised of many types of people. “You have to have someone who raises the cross,” McCaslin says, “someone who takes care of the money, someone who takes care of educating.” Even someone to teach the kids how to play baseball— so that they might make their own contribution to the community. That’s been McCaslin’s contribution to Omaha the past five years. By day, he oversees the finance, information technology, marketing and administration teams as director of operations at Continuum Worldwide Corporation, an information security company. That’s where he landed after majoring in English at Saint John’s, earning a master’s in English at Creighton University, where he taught for five years, and working for two decades for Mutual of Omaha. At heart, McCaslin’s a baseball guy, having also inherited that love from his father in a family of 12 kids with enough boys to field its own team. Though he played varsity basketball at Saint John’s, these days he is a switch-hitting centerfielder in a 35-over league and sharing his love of the game with the underprivileged youth of North Omaha, where he grew up, a minority white kid rooting for Bob Gibson in the ’67 and ’68 World Series. Five years ago, McCaslin started the North Omaha Baseball Initiative (NOBI), which assimilated players into the Memorial Little League, where his two boys played. The NOBI gave kids who wouldn’t have otherwise done so the chance to play baseball. The first year, the NOBI placed 26 kids ages 5-12 in the Memorial Little League. This past year, the NOBI, in conjunction with Omaha Public Schools and seven other district Little Leagues throughout Omaha, drew about 300 kids into the program. Many of the players receive either full or partial scholarships, and a significant number continue playing baseball past the Little League maximum