It is always special when a nonprofit organization is presented with the opportunity to hire someone who has a previous history of personal interest in areas related to the mission of that organization. That fortuitous opportunity presented itself to ABC when we hired Lori Glenn as our HerbClip™ managing editor. Lori came to us with a background in herbal studies and a particular interest in Ayurveda. In the past three years she has applied herself to editing and producing HerbClip, ABC’s unique twice-monthly literature summary and review service available online to ABC members from the Academic Level on up. It is also available in hard copy sent by mail along with the original articles (when available) to Sponsor Members.

Twice monthly Lori posts to the ABC Web site 12 HerbClips, summaries and/or critical reviews of recent clinical trials, review articles, pharmacological studies, and related articles published primarily in the medical and scientific literature. Since taking over her role with HerbClip, Lori has ensured that each “bin” of a dozen HerbClips is posted to the Web and mailed to Sponsor Members on time twice monthly. Since August, 2002, she has coordinated the writing, editing, peer-review, and distribution of nearly 900 HerbClips of the 2700 that are currently available in the database on the ABC site. Every month Lori coordinates the accessing of recently-published articles from various publishers, requests the permission to reprint those articles, assigns them to any of eight writers for their summarizing and/or critical reviewing, edits the draft of the HerbClip, sends them to peer reviewers, responds to peer review feedback, and prepares the final HerbClips for publication. This requires keeping many balls in the air at the same time, and Lori consistently is able to juggle all the variables to produce an excellent product, on time!

In 2004 Lori moved to northern California so she could be closer to her family. Not wanting to lose such a valuable employee, we decided to retain her experience and excellent skills and services. She now works from her home in California, and through the benefits of e-mail and PDF files, Lori has consistently met all her deadlines with the continued high-quality editorial material that people have come to expect from ABC.

Lori loves her work at ABC, and ABC staff thinks very highly of her. As a benefit of her longevity at ABC, Lori recently was very excited to be the ABC staff person who annually accompanies the faculty and participants at ABC’s Botanical Medicines from the Amazon and Machu Picchu tour in Peru. Lori Glenn is one of those people who is any employer’s dream: smart, efficient, friendly, flexible, reliable, trustworthy, interested in the subject matter, and the list of her beneficial traits goes on.

—Mark Blumenthal