Kenna Says: Silence is Explicit Culpability
Mary Jo Gregory is both the CEO and the President of the Board at NARBHA Institute in Flagstaff, Arizona — the organization that owns The Guidance Center. She earns over $792,000 a year in that role (FY 2023/2024). And before she was an executive, she was a nurse. Like every nurse, she once took an oath to do no harm.
And yet, faced with harm that is ongoing and documented — retraumatization, ADA violations, misuse of Title 36, and grievance processes designed to fail — her voice has been silent.
This matters. Because Mary Jo Gregory isn’t just another board member. She holds the top executive seat and presides over the board at NARBHA. She has the power to speak, to lead, and to set a different standard. If anyone could push back against the lawyers and say, “No, care comes first. No, trauma-informed training isn’t optional. No, calculated neglect is unacceptable, and no, we don’t violate civil rights” — it would be her.
But silence is also a choice. And when that silence comes from someone who once swore to do no harm, it is especially stark. It says that the survival of the institution comes before the survival of its clients; and puts a question mark next to her excessively high compensation.
That is not leadership. That is complicity. And it is exactly what makes The Guidance Center’s neglect in Flagstaff, Arizona not just systemic, but calculated.
