Jill “J.R.” Labbe

Vice President of Communications and Community Affairs for JPS Health Network

Jill “J.R.” Labbe is vice president of communications and community affairs for JPS Health Network, Tarrant County’s tax-supported healthcare system. She also oversees Volunteer Services, Community Outreach and the gift shop.

Prior to joining JPS in 2012, Labbe was the editorial director for theFort Worth Star-Telegram. When she was hired in 1992 as editorial director for the Arlington edition of the newspaper, she was the first fulltime female editorial writer in the newspaper’s history.

Labbe went to theStar-Telegramafter serving as editor of the A.H. Belo Corp.’sGrand Prairie Daily News. Her work experience prior to newspapers includes a stint as a national public relations coordinator for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and eight years in hotel sales and marketing in north Texas.

A 1997 graduate of Leadership Texas, a statewide network of women leaders, Labbe is a past president of the Rotary Club of Fort Worth, one of the largest clubs in the world with more than 450 members, and a past president of the National Conference of Editorial Writers (now called the Association of Opinion Journalists.) She received that organization’s lifetime achievement award in 2015.

Labbe sits on the boards of Goodwill Industries of Fort Worth and the Center for Transforming Lives as well as the Board of Governors of the Fort Worth Club. She is a past president of the Tarrant Literacy Coalition, a nonprofit agency she helped found to advocate for and provide training to low-literate adults in Tarrant, Parker and Johnson counties.

Labbe was named the 2018 Women of Distinction Connect Award honoree by the Girls Scouts of Texas Oklahoma Plains, a 2016 Great Woman of Texas honoree by the Fort Worth Business Pressand the 2010 Outstanding Woman in the Workplace by the City of Fort Worth’s Commission on Women. She is a life member of the Kansas University Alumni Association, having spent four great years of learning – and not all of it in a classroom – at the Lawrence campus.