About Baton Health®

Bringing Health Home™. We pass forward the best of prevention science by making it useful in everyday life.

Founders Story

I’m Lisa McAndrew Marquart. I founded Baton Health® in 2016 because I wanted well-researched ideas about healthy living to reach the
people who could use them—in their homes, senior living communities, schools, and the places where neighbors come together.

I come from people who cared for both land and one another. My father, Dr. William McAndrew, was a surgeon who planted Celilo Vineyard on Underwood Mountain in Washington’s Columbia Gorge. He died far too young. My mother, Margaret, was an artist, educator, and farmer who carried so much forward for our family. Their lives helped teach me that what we cultivate matters beyond our own lifetime.

My understanding of health was shaped by my children, too. When our first daughter died at a young age, I was able to hold her in my arms in a garden. Later, when another of our children developed unexpected chronic health needs, we moved from the wheat fields to Seattle for care we could not access in our rural community at the time. These experiences deepened my commitment to families having the care and support they need—and to making what we know about healthy living useful long before a crisis. I wanted to figure out how to bring health home.

Why “Baton Health®”?

I later had the opportunity, through a fellowship experience, to help share prevention science alongside people at Stanford Medicine’s Prevention Research Center. I loved that work. It matched a hope I already carried: that useful knowledge could reach more people and become part of everyday life - and I wanted to give that hope a mission—and an action others could join.

I have always loved being part of a relay. A baton is meant to move from one person’s hands to another’s. We receive knowledge and care, learn what works, put it into practice, and pass it on through how we live. That is why I named this work Baton Health®. The name is an invitation to our volunteers, community partners, and everyone who joins us: carry the best of healthy-living science forward, and try to take it to new levels together.

“Bringing Health Home™” is our way of making that invitation practical. Baton Health® connects prevention science and health-behavior change with the realities of daily life: food, movement, relationships, purpose, and the places where people live. No one approach fits everyone. We want people to have knowledge and tools they can use, adapt, and share.

Working in Community

Baton Health® works wherever people are living, learning, and caring for one another. We deliver workshops, work in senior living, and join with community members and local partners to make healthy-living practices more accessible. The people involved bring different experiences and strengths; passing the baton means learning from one another as well as sharing what we know.

Our work has taken shape through local growing and food-sharing efforts, too. The Snohomish Conservation District has featured the pollinator gardens and beehives at our farm in its Marquart Farms profile.
My Edmonds News has told the story of our growing space and its connection to sharing fresh food in “Planting Edmonds: Share your bounty?”

A Place to Grow Together

The Farm at Point Edwards holds a special place in our work. It is our private family home and the place we love most for trying new ideas. Here, the Baton Health® team, local volunteers, and our gardening community come together to innovate, grow food, and learn from one another. We call the learning that grows from this work The Teaching Farm™.

The farm is a private residence, not a place that is routinely open to the public. We do welcome others through selected tours and workshops, and we share ideas beyond the property so people can adapt useful growing designs and healthy living practices for their own homes and communities.

Our work is rooted in the Edmonds–Woodway area and connected to the wider Puget Sound region. Looking ahead, I hope what we develop with others can reach communities throughout Washington and beyond.
Land-grant universities and Extension networks offer an inspiring model for sharing practical knowledge widely. Building those connections is an aspiration, not a partnership we claim today.

Healthy roots take time. The knowledge and practices we pass on today may help people we will never meet. That is the promise we try to honor, one person and one place at a time.