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Mike Baker — Author, Healthcare CEO, Speaker and Advocate
Beautifully
Unfocused
I never planned to build any of this. I went into community health through AmeriCorps in 1999 and thought I had found a job. Twenty-seven years later I am still there, and for the last seventeen I have led Heritage Health, a community health center in North Idaho.
Somewhere in those years I started making things, because there were things happening in my family, my work and my own head that I could not leave alone. The AI art came first. Then music, then a podcast, then the books. I have always been an advocate, and watching Kellie and Sammie live with endometriosis turned that advocacy toward women’s health. From the outside, I understand why this looks like too many things. From where I sit, it is one life.
Or start with a book. Chapter one of every book is free to read → Latest · essay published Oct 6, 2026
The Rooms That Hold Us
Yesterday was our twenty-seventh anniversary. Kellie has lived with every version of me so far, and she stayed close enough to tell me the truth about all of them.
The Future of Health Care Needs Us in the Same Room
My Coeur d'Alene Press column after the Panhandle Health District forum: why every community meeting turns back into the 2020 fight, why I support PHD, and why North Idaho health care only works if we stay in the same room.
No Margin, No Mission
"No margin, no mission" gets said so often in nonprofit healthcare that we have mostly stopped asking what anybody means
What Work Gets to Ask of Us
A family reunion in Phoenix, work commitments that overlapped, and the in-laws I never got to hug. On deciding together whose plans move, with a free two-page worksheet to help.
I’ll send you the next one
My letter is called Just an Ordinary Tuesday. Essays mostly, and now and then a song, an episode, some artwork, or something from the advocacy work.
Joining is free, and it opens the Resource Library: twelve tools I built because we needed them.
Believe her the first time
People with endometriosis wait years to be believed. I watched people I love go through it. So I wrote the book, made the art, and say it out loud in rooms where decisions get made.
