Marg Stark, manager of marketing communications at Scripps Mercy Hospital, is good at “having no money and figuring out what we can do by working with other organizations that do have money.” She has proved it by taking $20,000 in start-up funding and turning it into award-winning neighborhood health programs.

Her projects have helped put Scripps Mercy Hospital on the U.S. News & World Report list of Top 50 Hospitals for the past two years.

“Probably the most important thing I’ve done was the heart care center campaign,” she says. That effort publicized Mercy’s heart care expertise in different neighborhoods through participation in neighborhood events like concerts, parades and festivals, and it earned the Health Care Communicators award for best public relations campaign in San Diego.

This year television viewers have seen a series of ads for health experts in their neighborhoods, and Stark is working on a “dinner out and walk about” program to involve local restaurants, trainers and appropriate others in heart-healthy dining and activities.

Stark has just sold her third book, “What No One Tells The Mom,” a sequel to “What No One Tells the Bride.” Her first book, “Timeless Healing,” written with Harvard physician Herbert Benson, has been translated into 13 languages.

She not only works at Mercy Hospital, but Stark, 39, is an active volunteer there as well. She is a member of Mercy 1000, a group of donors who support the hospital’s mental health team, the Behavioral Health Program.

For 10 years, Stark has been president of the San Diego Mount Holyoke College Alumnae. She is involved with fund-raising for Kensington Community Church where she is a member and she belongs to the Kensington Talmadge Neighborhood Association.

She and her husband, Darwin “Duke” Clark, a Navy commander, have two sons, Patrick, 6, and Liam, 3, whom she describes as carrot-tops with bright red hair.

— Sandy Pasqua