It was an auspicious moment for Twin Cities’ health care when Sister Mary Madonna Ashton, then the Executive Director of St. Mary’s Health Clinics, sat down for breakfast at the Minneapolis Club with Michael “Mick” Johnson, President of the Park Nicollet Foundation. “I talked about our desire to serve the community, and she talked about the needs of St. Mary’s Clinics,” Mick tells us. Over toast and coffee a transformative partnership was born between St. Mary’s Health Clinics and the entity known as Park Nicollet Health Services. But what was it that brought this nun and this Foundation leader to the breakfast table in the first place?                      Another satisfied patient.         To answer that question, we must look at the original purpose and business model of St. Mary’s Health Clinics. Way back in 1853, during a cholera epidemic that claimed thousands of lives, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet saw the need to open a hospital in St. Paul. They called it St. Joseph’s. The Sisters were teachers. They knew nothing about delivering health care or running hospitals, yet their can-do attitude prevailed. In 1992, the Sisters finally relinquished the bricks and mortar of St. Joseph’s, when they sold the hospital to HealthEast. At the same time, they set out to find a new way to fulfill their mission: to provide health care services free of charge to those who are medically underserved and uninsured. This time around, they took that mission to the streets and neighborhoods of the city. “They went where the need was,” says Barbara Dickie, Executive Director of the clinics.  Continued...