- We should remember Frances Wisebart Jacobs because there is no more authentic, brave, relentless woman.

- She was known as the mother of all charities, whether it be national Jewish health.

- What became United Way.

And the first kindergarten.

- Saw a problem and decided she could fix it.

- To the very end, she was spending her life in the slums of Denver, taking care of the town.

- As strong and enduring as the Rocky Mountains they stood beside.

As visionary as the views of the Grand Plains they looked across.

The women inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame are trailblazers whose work has improved and enriched our lives.

They are teachers, scientists, ranchers, leaders in business, education, religion, and the arts.

Women who have been recognized for their many contributions to our state, our country, and the world.

I'm Reynelda Muse and these are the stories of Great Colorado Women.

- Frances was called while she was still alive and now to this day, the mother of charities.

- Frances Wisebart Jacobs is a role model for us with her caring and her compassion and her ability to get things done.

- Not only did she have a huge heart, but she could think ahead and then convince other people to come with her.

- 'Cause she really demonstrates what one person, in this case, one woman can do with determination that we don't necessarily need huge movements, even one person can make a difference.

- She developed a new model that is now the model that United Way uses to raise money and to distribute funds.

It's a model that basically set the standard for philanthropy and charity.

- And who she is, is what I aspire to be as a woman, because she used her heart, her voice, her influence to create something that is still impacting so many today.

- I think Frances Wisebart Jacob's greatest accomplishment would have to be National Jewish Medical Research Center.

- National Jewish is the number one respiratory hospital in the US.

- The success, the growth that we've had today was set from the beginning of National Jewish Health and that culture that Frances envisioned.

- But also in a broader sense, she pushed home health care.

We wouldn't have a visiting nurse association today all around the country, probably except for her idea.

You don't wait for the poor and the dying to come in, you go visit them at where they live.

- I think Frances would have been very proud of the legacy that she helped create.

Her vision really was very inclusive in that she was looking to aid people from all walks of life, no matter their religious or ethnic background.

And so she dreamed big visions, but she also had the capability to make them work.

- If you just look at the spectrum of what she was able to achieve and just the sheer number of charities that she was associated with, whether it be the kindergarten, whether it be national Jewish Health, I mean, she was just a remarkable lady.

- I think we will never truly understand how many lives she has changed.

And we celebrate the woman that was the heart of this movement: Frances Wisebart Jacobs.

- Frances was born in Kentucky and her family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio when she was very young.

She was one of seven children.

Her parents were immigrants and she was born into and lived a Jewish lifestyle.

She attended schools in Cincinnati, Ohio, and she became a school teacher that was very common for girls of that day.

At 16, she was already a school teacher.

- I was just 20 years old in 1863, when I left my home in Cincinnati, Ohio with my new husband, Abraham.

We drove a covered wagon all the way to the Colorado mountains, where he sold supplies to gold miners in this dreadful dusty mining camp called Central City.

Ugh, such a struggle to keep a clean and proper home.

- She and her husband, Abraham, started out in Central City and they resided there for seven years.

They didn't come to Denver until 1870.

And he was a successful merchant.

They had three children together.

One child, unfortunately, died at a young age.

- Sometimes in life, our greatest sorrow can lead to good.

I lost my oldest son at age nine and was crushed with grief.

I could do nothing for months.

Then I decided to turn this grief into "tzedakah," a Jewish word, meaning charity, all must give.

Tzedakah led me, Frances Wisebart Jacobs, to become Denver's "mother of charities".

- Shortly after they moved to Denver was when Frances started a lot of her philanthropic and charitable work.

I believe it was a very important part of her faith to be involved in helping people who were less fortunate.

- I think that most people are familiar with the Hebrew term "tzedakah," it's commonly translated as charity, but literally it means justice.

She felt it was an obligation for those who were better off to help those who were not.

- One of the very important tenants of this belief is that you do it willingly, do it with a full heart.

- She was fierce about supporting the charitable organizations that existed in the Denver metro area in Colorado.

- Now the male movers and shakers were urging everyone to come to Colorado, strike it rich, and retire for the rest of your life.

But Frances Wisebart Jacobs and some other women concerned about not everybody did strike it rich.

That there were a lot of poor, homeless orphans.

Also, there were a lot of widows.

Mining was a very dangerous activity.

The major activity here.

Many men died or got sick early on, leaving widows.

Who's gonna take care of those widows at a point when there is no social security, no safety net?

- She was out there taking care of people, doing it herself.

In addition to convincing other people that these ideas had merit and the fact that so many of these charities that she started lasted for decades and much longer than that shows that the power of her example and what she did has been enduring.

- She became the first president of the Hebrew Ladies Benevolent Society.

- I joined with the other women in our small Jewish community, and we formed the Hebrew Ladies Benevolence Society.

Oh, we needed to help all the poor Jewish immigrants who had fled to Denver from the east seeking a better life.

- These were women who really were trying to address the needs of the impoverished from the beginning, because, remember, this was a small town.

No social services organized in place and they tried to take up the slack.

- But she saw that the problem was bigger than one religion and one society.

And she founded another organization of a greater group of women in the Denver area.

- Unfortunately, everywhere I went, I met more and more desperate families in need of help.

So I called upon my friends, Elizabeth Byers and Margaret Evans, both very prominent society women.

Together we established the Denver Ladies Relief Society, a charity for all, based on good deeds and not religious creeds.

To my surprise, I became the society spokesperson.

One evening, I was in front of 2000 people at Denver's Tabor opera house.

Ladies and gentlemen, the poor demand our attention.

Why every day I see women arrested and locked up with men, innocent children neglected, mothers working for a pittance.

[Frances signs] These are terrible things I have seen.

[crowd applauding] I went on for two hours.

Reporters took down every word and wives told their wealthy husbands: "Open your wallet."

I believe where women lead in good deeds, men will follow.

- She opened doors and still is opening doors for women.

- This is the point where women don't have much power in society, they're basically property of their husbands.

- She didn't let what the perceived vision of what women's roles should be at the time narrow her choices.

She just went full steam ahead and really went way beyond what women's sphere was considered at the time.

- When you look at the role of women over a hundred years ago, who didn't have the right to vote, certainly wouldn't have been running for public office.

We're not sitting on boards or owning businesses.

And I think about her saying women had to have a place at the table.

They had to have a voice.

They had to help make and shape decisions at the policy level.

She understood the role of politics.

She understood the role of women having a place at that table.

- Now, as Denver's population grew and grew, I was bothered by a most unlikely problem.

The city's many new charities were competing with each other.

Business owners complained to me, "Ah, there's someone at my door every week asking for money.

I can't give to all of them."

And I noticed on my visits that some families actually have shelves full of donated goods.

Others had nothing.

Something needed to be done.

- We're just getting into the progressive era in the United States, but you're having a time where people are trying to apply business principles to all areas of society where they think they will make a difference.

And that includes charity.

- Business men were tired of being approached by one charity after another.

Said, "You need to get your act together, consolidate.

We can get one check that will be distributed as you see best fit among other needy organizations in the community.

- They were trying to rationalize charity and eliminate duplication in their minds.

So a centralized charity organization was the way of trying to coordinate charitable efforts.

- And in 1887, a Monsignor, a minister, a priest, and I created the Charity Organization Society.

It united the charities under one umbrella organization that campaigned for funds once a year, then we gave each charity a share of these funds to provide their own services.

As the secretary of the organization, I saw much good come from this united way of giving.

- To have these organizations join together, raise money together, and then work to distribute that money among themselves.

That was a brand new concept.

- And that, of course, grew in to eventually the United Way of America.

- So when this movement, the society, came together to support charitable organizations doing good work.

It was the Hebrew Benevolent Lady Society of which Frances was a member.

That was one of the first four original partners that the United Way supported and still supports to this day over a hundred years later.

I think as Coloradans, we should be proud that Frances's vision and work has become a worldwide movement.

What started here, in Colorado, as people came into our state as the gateway to the west, they saw what we were doing.

They saw what Frances was doing and they took that idea back to their community.

There are now 2,400 United Ways across the world, looking at how we collectively worked together.

And that spark of an idea went from community to community, to country, to country, to now that the United way is a worldwide movement.

All because Frances had an idea of how to unite a community together to serve.

Her spirit is interwoven in everything that we do.

The highest awards at Mile High United Way gives to a woman in our community is the Frances Wisebart Jacobs award.

So I hope she would be proud of the United Way, but I hope she will rejoice in herself and what she did, and that we say thank you to her everyday.

- Frances traveled frequently to meetings of the National Conference of Charities.

And actually it was one meeting that she attended in San Francisco that gave her the impetus to start the first kindergarten here in Denver.

- It was 1884 and I was in San Francisco at a conference when I visited a delightful place.

The Golden Gate free kindergarten.

They provide safe daycare for working mothers and children play and learn.

- That sparked an idea in her head.

And she came back to Denver and started an association to do free kindergarten.

- In just one year, Denver opened its first free kindergarten at Stanley school.

- And eventually the Denver public schools actually integrated kindergartens into the school system.

This was another example where Frances said, "This is a good idea.

It needs to be implemented in Denver.

And I can see that it's implemented."

- The railroads just arrived in 1870.

During this period, many, many people are coming here for health reasons.

- Railroads had signs up and posters saying that invalids were welcome here and that they would be cured.

- At that time, tuberculosis was known as consumption, but it was a respiratory pandemic.

- During this period, tuberculosis is the number one killer in the country.

In the world, as a matter of fact.

- And doctors were sending consumptives to Colorado because it was believed that the sunshine and the dry air would help cure them.

- What worried me the very most was the more than 30,000 people in Denver alone, who suffered from tuberculosis.

Doctors everywhere were telling their patients, "Well, there's no cure, but a sunny, dry climate can help."

- TB victims were encouraged to come to Colorado because they were trying to increase the population of the state so we could qualify and go from a territory to a state, of course.

- So they arrived here, sick.

Without money, many of them.

And so they, they lived in pretty squalid conditions.

- Not many people appreciated them being there.

They wanted TB patients to wear bells so you'd hear them coming, could stay out of the way.

Just nobody wanted to talk about it.

Nobody wanted to deal with it, except for Frances Wisebart Jacobs.

- Our state leaders denied the problem and newspapers refused to mention the word consumption.

One day as I was walking along, a man dropped right at my feet.

- She took care of many of those people.

She walked the streets.

- She was noted for walking around Denver with her carpet bag full of food, medicines, soap, which she thought was so important to health and cleanliness.

- I always carried my satchel with food, medicine, and grandpa's tar soap.

I never went anywhere that food was needed that soap wasn't needed more.

- She was fearless.

She was relentless.

She was brave.

She just didn't talk about this.

She put herself in the community as well.

- But she took it upon herself personally to go visit them at their homes.

She arranged for doctor's appointments them.

She often paid for those doctor's appointments herself.

- I can' imagine what the conversations must have been with her husband or her father when she said, "I think I need to be out serving people who live in poverty, serving people who have tuberculosis."

I couldn't imagine her family saying "You're doing what?"

- Friends would say to me, "Ew Frances!

How can you stand to go there?"

"Well, it's my work."

I replied.

Where others saw squalor and filth, I saw humans in need of love, kindness, and a bit of good cheer.

- But she obviously realized that more was gonna be needed if those people work gonna get help at all.

She knew that they were destitute and poor and needed a place to go for treatment, but there was no place to go.

- There was no municipal hospital for TB patients at the time, and so it was really up to local ethnic and religious groups to come to the aid of those TB victims.

- She understood that every single one of us at some point in our life journey will need the support of a friend, of a family member, or of a community.

She basically gave voice to the vision of having a hospital, a free hospital a place to do that it didn't matter what your race was, or your means in life, but just that you were suffering.

- I marched into the office of the Rocky Mountain News.

"Why can't you start a campaign to build a free hospital?

Everywhere I see the sick coughing their lives away.

And then when someone falls, the police patrol come and take them to jail.

Sick people do not need a jail.

They need a hospital.

Now."

- Frances Wisebart Jacobs saw a problem and decided she could fix it.

She epitomizes Margaret Mead's words.

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world."

Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

- She turned to the local Jewish community and she was the main impetus behind the founding of National Jewish Hospital for Consumptive.

- Rabbi Friedman and I convinced the Jewish community to build the hospital.

We asked for funds from all of our organizations in the east and raised $42,000 to buy land on East Colfax.

- And that's the genesis of National Jewish Hospital, the number one respiratory hospital in the US.

- The motto for National Jewish at the time was that none may enter who can pay, none can pay who enter.

In other words, it was a free hospital and National Jewish never charged a patient a nickel for the first 70 years of its existence.

The only patients that can be admitted to the hospital, at National Jewish were those that were homeless and those that had, at the time, an incurable respiratory disease, tuberculosis.

So that's how National Jewish was formed.

- And the cornerstone for what is now National Jewish was laid in October of 1892, one month before Frances died.

- Months earlier, being very, well, worn out and weary, I received an urgent message from a family I knew.

"Mrs. Jacobs, the baby cannot breathe.

Please bring medicine."

I had to go.

The baby could die.

On the way home, I was the one who collapsed on the street.

I never, again, rose from my bed.

- She did contract pneumonia and the story goes that she was out visiting sick people in the rain and that she probably contracted the illness from someone that she had visited and that her immune system had probably been diminished.

At her funeral, there were 4,000 people.

So it was recognized throughout that she had such a broad effect.

- The eulogies included people who talked about her amazing ability to cross lines and to engage with people, no matter their background.

Had she lived longer, I'm sure there would be additional amazing institutions that she had a hand in.

- Frances passed in 1892.

So National Jewish built its first hospital building, which was done in 1892, but didn't open until 1899 as a free hospital.

And we wouldn't have been there without Frances.

- I think something like National Jewish hospital would, for her, have been a dream come true.

And I think it was her niece after she died, who later said, my aunt was a dreamer and a doer.

And so she dreamed big visions, but she also had the capability to make them work.

- A statue of me holding my satchel stands in the lobby of National Jewish hospital.

And up in the Gold Dome at the state capital, there are 16 stained glass windows honoring Colorado's distinguished pioneers.

15 men and one woman, Frances Jacobs, mother of charities.

- I think she was honored in the rotunda of early pioneers in Colorado because she had played such a major role in health and health played such a major role in the growth and development of Colorado.

So I think it was a natural choice.

- There are 16 stain glass windows in the Colorado state capital in the dome.

And they are 15 men and Frances Wisebart Jacobs.

- I think she was selected because she represents the best of who Colorado is, and that should be in our state capital.

So we remember every single day it's about service to Coloradans.

I think that's why we celebrate her and why I take great pride of looking up in our state capital and seeing her there.

- I think we should remember Frances for her extraordinary example and the fact that so many of these charities that she started lasted for decades and much longer than that, shows that the power of her example and what she did has been enduring.

And we simply can't lose the beauty and the power of her story.

- She just showed up.

She didn't wait for permission.

She didn't wait for the title.

Everyone else that helped found the United Way had a title.

Frances was a woman with a passion to serve.

She spoke to the power of women, the Women United movement today, that we still support, came from this idea of the power of women together in a league, in an organization of their own.

This little idea has grown to impact millions.

- She demonstrated one person can make a difference.

She demonstrated that one woman can make a difference.

- 50 years from now or 150 years from now, I'm gonna predict they're still gonna be a United Way.

They're still gonna be need to help people in the community and what she did and how she established new ways of thinking and new ways of behaving and new ways of raising money are still gonna be important.

- Her words, her life, her service, all aligned.

There was no more authentic, brave, relentless woman that I think we as Coloradans aspire to be.

We need to remember and celebrate Frances Wisebart Jacobs for the next 135 years.