'Something I was raised to believe in:' Virginia Hall pursues charity beyond J.P. Hall party
Virginia Hall has helped people in Northeast Florida give to their neighbors nearly all her life.
As a teenager, she helped her parents manage mountains of bikes and toys people donated for yearly Christmas parties organized by J.P. Hall Children’s Charities, the nonprofit named for her grandfather, Clay County’s sheriff for more than 35 years.
She took over the parties after finishing college in the late 1980s, and by the 2000s was fundraising enough that a charity auction produced a bidding war whose winning price for a lemon meringue pie topped $10,000.
So when Hall broadened her focus to include fundraising for health care, she discovered a lot of room to do good.
“The mission of serving the underserved … that’s something I was raised to believe in,” said Hall, the president and chief development officer for the Ascension St. Vincent’s Foundation, the charity arm of a health care system serving a swath of communities in Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia.
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Hall, one of three winners of the Times-Union’s 2022 EVE Awards honoring women enhancing life on the First Coast, leads work to grow and use an asset portfolio estimated last year at about $73 million.
Although still chair of her family’s charity, Hall has held a series of posts within Ascension St. Vincent’s during the past decade, becoming foundation president after predecessor Jane Lanier retired three years ago.
“She has such deep connections within the community that it let us take the message to groups of people that we might not have been able” to reach before, said Foundation Chairman Thomas “Mac” McGehee Jr. “She brings them in.”
The St. Vincent’s connection started when the healthcare system was preparing to open a hospital in Clay County, where Hall’s family had lived for four generations.
She had worked for the county’s planning department and spent six years in the 2000s as a member of the Green Cove Springs City Council, including a year as the town’s youngest mayor on record.
She had spent five years as marketing director for the Clay County Agricultural Fair before working for St. Vincent’s part-time in 2016, moving to full-time jobs two years later.
Ascension St. Vincent’s helps bring medical care to needy
The foundation raises money for a huge array of projects that deliver services ranging from mobile mammography to community nursing and medical equipment for home use.
That work includes gathering donations for hospital enhancements, like a heart and vascular pavilion that opened in 2020 at the Riverside campus where St. Vincent’s has operated since 1916, but the foundation also marshals money to reach people who might never come to the hospital because they lack insurance or other means to pay for treatment.
“We go outside the walls of the hospital to find patients in need,” said Hall, 55.
The foundation’s Medical Mission at Home project has delivered medical care to hundreds of people through events at the Prime Osborn Convention Center, although the pandemic has disrupted planning for a repeat of the one-day gatherings last held in 2019.
A mobile health outreach ministry had provided free care in St. Johns County for 18 years before that was complemented in July by the opening of a 56-bed Ascension St. Vincent’s St. Johns County hospital.
In addition to managing the foundation’s web of projects, Hall remains involved with her family’s charity, but has been able to step back from its direct oversight.
Hall and her husband, attorney Mark Scruby, raised six children, and Hall’s sons J.P. and Matthew have taken on roles respectively as president and vice president of J.P. Hall Charities.
“They continue the legacy of my dad,” she said.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Virginia Hall balances charity for Ascension St. Vincent's, J.P. Hall
