Back in fall 2002, Marti Baum, MD, was restless. As an assistant professor in pediatrics at Loma Linda University School of Medicine and a follow-up pediatrician at the LLU Children's Hospital pediatric heart transplant clinic, Dr. Baum had seen wave after wave of emergency room patients, but felt she had done little to stop the causes of ER visits--gangs, broken homes, stunted human potential.

Now, with a lucky break and hard work, Dr. Baum has reached a position where she can steer at-risk kids toward a brighter future and encourage young medical professionals to engage with the underserved.

"We were doing pretty well once the gunshot wounds hit the hospital, but as a medical group, maybe we were not paying as much attention to the kids ... before they got to the hospital," Dr. Baum says. "It just seemed like we were not making a lot of headway."

Surprisingly, that feeling crystallized during an appointment with a well-to-do, well-educated mother and her child, who suffered from a fever of unknown origin. Asked a month earlier to keep a log of her child's temperature and other metrics, "she had done nothing--no calendar, nothing," Dr. Baum recalls. "I just remember walking out and putting the chart on my desk. I sat there in a daze thinking, 'I can't do this again. These are capable moms with resources, [and with] this particular mom, I'm not making a difference. Somebody else can do this with her; let me work with the moms who don't have resources and try to find resources and help coach them.'"

This is where chance came in. Concerned that she was losing her desire to practice medicine, Dr. Baum appealed to LLU Chancellor Richard Hart, MD, who told her about an open position at the Social Action Community Health System-Norton, a university facility focused on disadvantaged clientele. A month later, she left her practice at LLU and started as Norton's first dedicated pediatrician. "Many of my kids come in barefoot. I have families who live in tents. We have moms who have just come out of jail. Many of our kids are brought in by foster parents or kinship care," explains Dr. Baum. "[Hart] saw the vision of putting somebody on the front line for medically at-risk kids--the 'medical homeless,' as we term it."

Along with her clinic duties, Dr. Baum supervises residents enrolled in LLU's Outreach to Kommunity Kids, or OK Kids, a monthlong program that fulfills a required community-pediatrics rotation. "I'm a huge believer in learning by service," Dr. Baum says. "Residents are able to interface on behalf of their risky patients, rather than just sending them all to the Women, Infant, and Children's program and Child Protective Services. ... They can intervene for their patients and refer them to places where the patients can get adjunctive help."

The rotation also exposes residents to the safety and nutrition needs of the underserved. They work at soup kitchens, conduct middle-school nutrition efforts, work with parents of at-risk kids and perform other service activities associated with LLU's Norton Neighborhoods Initiative.

"Dr. Baum is a real busy, busy lady," says Joseph Rodriguez, a registered nurse and graduate of LLU, who founded the Gang Reduction Intervention Team in 1996. Dr. Baum serves on GRIT's board of directors, where she watches the nonprofit's finances and arranges volunteers. "Through the residency program at the university, we use a lot of the interns that Dr. Baum oversees. They play a role in teaching our kids about STDs, hepatitis, tuberculosis and CPR," Rodriguez says. In the past year, GRIT worked with about 320 at-risk youth in San Bernardino, Riverside and San Gabriel counties who are in school, on probation or who are passing through the California Juvenile Justice Department.

Dr. Baum's philanthropic activities favor programs that serve children and students. She is associate director of Operation Jessica, a four-day retreat and student-mentoring program aimed at reclaiming kids from gangs. She directs Project Hope, which connects student mentors with pregnant teens and teen parents in San Bernardino-area high schools. She helps recruit for Court Appointed Special Advocates, a national organization that finds volunteers to spend quality time with at-risk foster children. Dr. Baum also serves on the Health Initiative Advisory Committee of the San Bernardino City Unified School District, co-chairs the San Bernardino County School Nurses/Physicians Collaborative and coordinates student service through LLU's Community-Academic Partners in Service.

Service is prominent in Dr. Baum's family. Her father is dentist and philanthropist Lloyd Baum, who in 2004 founded an eponymous School of Dentistry at the Universidad de Montemorelos in Mexico. Dr. Baum's husband, Robert Hardesty, MD, is a plastic and reconstructive surgeon with more than 30 international mission trips under his belt.

The two eldest of Dr. Baum's four children are moving toward careers in medicine and philanthropy. "My daughter--a freshman med student--is heading to do service projects in Mexico and will be going to Ecuador in July," she says, proudly. "It's in the environment; it gets talked about at supper. They know that dad is always going overseas, and mom is involved in San Bernardino County. It's always been kind of part and parcel of who we are as a family."