December Community Hero: Dr. Manisha Shanbhag has a heart for service

Dr. Manisha Shanbhag Patel spends her workdays helping heal hearts and much of the rest of her time opening her heart to others.

At Halloween, she organizes “Books for Boos,” which collects and then distributes thousands of books to kids who flock to trick-or-treat on Earle Street near downtown Greenville. This was the fifth year for what has become an eagerly awaited annual event.

In November, she took to the ballroom stage at the Greenville Convention Center, dancing and raising funds for Senior Action as a local “celebrity” in Dancing with the Carolina Stars.

She is a board member for Pendleton Place, which helps advocate for and support vulnerable children, young adults and families. Shanbhag calls the organization’s work vital to trying to solve some of the most persistent and difficult social service challenges facing society.

And foremost, she’s mother to two boys, ages 10 and 12, and their constant whirl of school and sports activities.

Talk to her for more than a few minutes and you’ll likely hear Shanbhag say, “I love my job!” more than once. It’s not always entirely clear which one she’s referring to.

For her commitment to helping others in so many different ways, Shanbhag is December’s Greenville News Community Hero.

The Community Hero program, sponsored by the Greenville Federal Credit Union, is a way of recognizing generous, noble and selfless work by those among us who make our community a better place.

‘They didn’t ask for any of this’

Professionally, Shanbhag trained as a pediatric cardiologist. Her specialty is caring for adults who survived heart defects as children.

“In the 1950s, 15 percent of children born with heart defects would live to adulthood. Now, 95 percent or more live well into adulthood,” she says. “We have this fixed population of pediatric and a large and growing number of adults who were born with heart problems.”

“They are resilient. It’s a family practice,” she says of her work with Prisma Health’s Carolina Cardiology Consultants, based at the Patewood medical campus. “Moms come in bringing files from when their kids had their first surgery. We have women with half their hearts, single ventricles, having babies, which was unheard of.”

She says that often, her patients had to undergo several surgeries “just to get to kindergarten.” Many have heart problems with genetic roots, like Down syndrome.

“It’s the best thing, when you find a job where every day you expect someone’s going to make it incredible, one of my patients is going to make it incredible for me.”

The complexity of the cases and the opportunities to help are what drives her, she says.

“They didn’t do this to themselves. I didn’t want to do the type of cardiology where people are smoking and eating poorly and did all this to themselves,” she said. “I’d rather take care of patients who are supremely complicated but did not ask for any of this.”

A legacy of giving

Shanbhag was born and raised in Spartanburg and graduated from Dorman High School in 1997. She attended Duke University for her undergraduate work and medical school. A residency took her to the University of Pennsylvania and then to a fellowship at Emory University in Atlanta before she returned home to the Upstate.

Her parents came from India in the mid-1970s, settling into their new home of Spartanburg as they were settling into their arranged-to-meet marriage.

Her father was a textile engineer. When she was a child, he was often called to service machinery at mills at all hours, Shanbhag says. Her mother “did the brunt of everything for us growing up. They both worked. They still work.”

Now, her parents’ work is in real estate development as owners of hotels in Spartanburg and Greenville.

Sam and Geeta Shanbhag became part of their community in part by helping people however they could.

“They are the most amazing humans,” Shanbhag says. “Even when they really had nothing, their motto was always ‘the more you give, the more you have, so look for places to do something every day.’”

She jokes that it got a little bit annoying when she was a child.

“Do we really have to pull up a chair for everybody? Do we really have to open doors and do all the dishes and babysit for free and all that stuff?” she said.

But thanks to her parents, she says that giving spirit is so ingrained in her and her younger brother, who lives nearby, that it’s almost automatic.

It’s also something she’s trying to instill in her boys, who she says are now often eager to offer their help.

‘A beautiful thing’

Shanbhag “blames” the beginnings of the Books for Boos idea on her younger son. The first year they lived on Earle Street, she says she was not prepared for the enormous number of trick or treaters.

“Earle Street is crazy on Halloween,” she says, crowded with throngs of kids who come from all over.

When she ran out of the candy she had gotten for the visitors, she turned to the loot her boys had collected earlier in the evening.

She said that her then-5-year-old looked at his well-stocked bookshelves and suggested, somewhat seriously, that instead of giving away his candy, “why don’t we give away all these books?”

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An idea born of mild desperation has become a tradition that just completed its fifth year. Starting in August each year, Shanbhag says that her home starts to look like a warehouse, stacked with baskets and boxes of thousands of books donated by hundreds of people who want to help.

It takes a half-dozen friends and volunteers, including her sons, to operate the book giveaway.

Shanbhag says that she recently completed the Greenville Chamber’s Leadership Greenville program, an experience she calls eye-opening and mind-expanding.

“There aren’t many doctors that do it, but I was desperate to understand a lot of the issues I saw,” she said. “I saw where the gaps are, but as a physician you live in a little bubble and you don’t know what are the community agencies that are working on things, what are the processes and how do we actually impact them.”

She said she expected, that for the big community issues, things like health disparities and homelessness and literacy, she might find that there’s not much a single individual can do.

“But everyone can do something. You start small,” she said. “It’s like the Books for Boos thing. It’s a decent idea and somehow, our community is so ready to give that if you put something out there, everybody wants to contribute. It’s a beautiful thing.”

This article originally appeared on Greenville News: December Community Hero: Dr. Manisha Shanbhag has a heart for service