Championing Change: The Remarkable Journey of Lara Blume McGee

Lara Blume McGee likes things to be balanced.

“I like things to be in order. I have always been highly organized and very disciplined. It’s just how I am. It’s who I am,” she said.

The Little Rock native must be organized and disciplined to keep one successful consulting firm, two nonprofit organizations, one soon-to-launch medical practice and operating at peak day-to-day efficiency while raising four school-age children.

“Let’s just say, I wear a lot of hats,” she said. “Hopefully, I look good wearing each of them.”

McGee owns her power as a daughter, wife, mother, business leader and philanthropist.

“I was raised by parents who taught me that if you see a need and say to yourself, ‘someone should do something,’ then what are you waiting for?” she said. “I am someone; I can do something, so I do.”

Emboldened by early modeling successes, McGee approached her parents at the age of 15 to express her desire to pursue a career in the field. After she pitched an elaborate presentation, as close to a business plan as any high school student could develop, to her supportive parents, they agreed to entertain the idea under one condition — that her plan be endorsed by her principal at Little Rock Central.

Armed with her parents’ support and her principal’s encouragement, McGee landed in Miami, where she was signed by Elite Model Management. Living on her own at age 16, McGee found herself hundreds of miles away from home and completing her high school degree via correspondence courses.

“Looking back now, especially now that I’m a mother myself, I am absolutely astonished at the courage it took, not only for me but for my parents, to allow me to follow my dreams,” she said. “I mean, to roll the dice on such a gamble?”

As it turned out, it was a gamble that paid off. McGee enjoyed a successful modeling career that would take her from Miami to Los Angeles, New York, London and the Maldives.

Ready for a new challenge beyond the runway, McGee decided to parlay her natural gifts for event planning and doing good for others for her next professional pursuit.

McGee found a mentor in Leigh Steinberg, the sports super agent who served as the inspiration for the title character in the 1996 Academy Award-winning film Jerry Maguire.

Having worked with her on a project, Steinberg recognized McGee’s flair for events as well as her interest in philanthropic endeavors. He thought McGee would be the right person to help bring an organization to fruition.

Steinberg’s hunch paid off not only for his client, but also for his protege.

Based on the success of this initial experience, McGee founded Team Up World in 2007 as a boutique nonprofit consulting firm specializing in celebrity sports management and philanthropy. To date, Team Up World has successfully assisted more than 50 professional athletes in the establishment of their own philanthropic nonprofit organizations and/or foundations.

“My father was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — ALS — in 2009,” McGee said. “At the time, I don’t know that I fully understood what that meant. My father had always been the picture of health. He had never been sick, so I remember thinking, well, whatever this is, they will treat it, and then he will be over it.”

McGee and her family soon discovered, however, that would not be the case. Formerly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that are responsible for voluntary movement and breathing.

Realizing recovery was not a reasonable goal for her father’s condition, McGee — who had been living and working in Newport Beach, Calif. — opted to move home to Little Rock in 2012 so that she could help care for her father and make the most of the time he had left.

“There is no known cure, and most patients are given life expectancies of two to five years following diagnosis,” said McGee, whose father died in 2015. “It is a heartbreaking and helpless thing to watch someone you love suffer through this.”

Helpless is not a word that sits well with McGee, so she began formulating a plan to help her father and her family take back some degree of control over the disease.

McGee founded ALS in Wonderland, a nonprofit organization with a simple, straight-forward mission statement driven specifically to create awareness and provide funding to directly benefit people living with ALS in Arkansas.

“There may be nothing we can do to prevent the physical toll that ALS takes on patients,” McGee said. “Instead, we focus on what we can do. We can help patients with the financial impact the disease can have on their lives. We can address the emotional needs of the patient and their families and their caregivers.”

Since its establishment in 2013, ALS in Wonderland has served about 150 Arkansas ALS patients and awarded financial assistance grants valued at more than $550,000.

Having originally moved home with the intention of returning to California, fate had other plans when a chance encounter at brunch ultimately led to romance with and marriage to Dr. Brian McGee in 2014.

Today, the McGees are the proud parents of four: a teenage daughter and triplets consisting of two girls and a boy.

McGee is currently preparing to take an active role in her husband’s soon-to-launch practice — Digestive Care — and she has just taken on the additional role of executive director of Colorectal Health Advocates & Doctors.

“You know what they say: if you want something done, give it to a woman,” she said. “A woman will get it done, and usually better.”

AY MAGAZINE MAY 2024 | RON STANDRIDGE