Arthur Culbert headshot

Arthur Culbert

Executive Director

Contact Info

Phone : (314) 249-8500
Email : [email protected]

About Arthur

Educator, inventor, urban farmer, children’s author, photo journalist, and philanthropist, Dr. Culbert is a social entrepreneur with forty years of experience in higher education. He founded the non-profit organizations Health Literacy Missouri and Central West End Farm, co-founded STL Village, and established a foundation, Sprouting Gift Gardens. A social activist since inventing the Early Medical School Selection Program in 1982, Arthur has dedicated his life’s work to addressing inequities.

Dr. Culbert began his career in Boston. For 31 years he served as a faculty member and a dean at the Boston University Schools of Medicine and Public Health. He achieved prominence in multiple areas, including minority medical education, student affairs, and undergraduate public health education. Dr. Culbert taught undergraduate and graduate students, published and presented papers on subjects ranging from medical students’ responsibilities for treating patients with AIDS-presented at the World’s Aid Conference- to the relocation of baseball stadiums-presented at the annual baseball conference at New York’s Baseball Hall of Fame.
Upon his first retirement, Dr. Culbert moved to St. Louis. He spent his second career building a non-profit organization, serving as founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of Health Literacy Missouri, our nation’s leader and the world’s largest non-profit community organization dedicated to health literacy. Dr. Culbert served as a member of the Institute of Medicine’s Roundtable on Health Literacy and was designated a Health Care Hero by the St. Louis Business Journal.

Dr. Culbert was the founding Chair of the STL Village board. He created the Central West End Farm; with 4th graders he helped provide healthy food for thousands of hungry people in the community for ten years while serving as Urban Farmer in Residence at New City School in the Central West End. He completed a nine year term as a trustee at the St. Louis College of Pharmacy while holding faculty appointments at Saint Louis University College for Public Health and Social Justice and at University of Missouri School for the Health Professions. Dr. Culbert resides in St. Augustine, Florida where he manages Gift Gardens and serves as Executive Director of Compassionate St. Augustine. He is a member of the leadership team of Good Trouble addressing social problems in the community while building Gift Gardens in underserved communities.