Board members are expected to actively support CFHA’s mission by serving as ambassadors for our work within their own communities and professional networks.
Now is your time to vote! We have eight candidates for this year’s Board of Directors election, and four individuals will be selected to join the Board. Please review the candidates’ statements below and cast your vote by Tuesday, September 30th.
You must be a CFHA member to participate in the election. All non-member submissions will not be accepted. Learn more about membership here.
Dear CFHA Board of Directors Selection Committee,
It is with great enthusiasm that I submit my personal nomination to serve as a CFHA Board Member for the 2026–2028 term. As Director of Behavioral Health Integration at Emory Healthcare and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Emory School of Medicine, I have embraced the immense challenge of advancing whole-person health through systems-level, interprofessional collaboration. Addressing this challenge within a large, diverse academic health system has required more than implementing a plan or adopting a model of care—it has demanded breaking down silos, fostering creativity, and nurturing a culture of shared responsibility and interprofessional trust.
Developing a deep understanding of the needs of patients, colleagues, learners, and the health system in pursuit of whole-person health has been both complex and humbling. Leaders, too, need support, and CFHA has provided me with a space for reflection and a community that continues to inspire and sustain my work.
It would be an honor to give back to the CFHA community that has given me so much by serving on the Board of Directors and contributing to the following priority areas:
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)
In the context of CFHA, I define DEI as an intentional commitment to sustaining a culture in which all members feel respected, supported, and valued. DEI is not merely a mission or a metric—it is a guiding core value that should inform all decisions made in service of the organization and its members. In the coming years, CFHA will face the challenge of maintaining its current culture while advancing inclusive excellence amid a shifting sociopolitical climate. I believe it will be important to:
- Evaluate whether current organizational structures unintentionally promote internal siloing.
- Consider the evolving language of DEI and develop specific supports to help members effectively communicate this core value.
Engaging CFHA
My background offers a breadth of perspectives that can benefit CFHA’s future. I am a practicing psychiatrist embedded in multiple care team contexts, including serving as a Collaborative Care psychiatric consultant for primary and specialty care populations (e.g., ambulatory palliative medicine and a novel bleeding disorders clinic) and as an Interventional Psychiatrist providing advanced treatments (e.g., electroconvulsive therapy, ketamine/esketamine, transcranial magnetic stimulation) for patients with severe or treatment-refractory psychiatric conditions.
As a health system administrator, I champion the expansion of Integrated Behavioral Health through initiatives such as CoCM, eConsults, and digital mental health solutions. In my role as Consultative Behavioral Health Medical Director for the Emory Healthcare Population Health Collaborative, I advise on the development of a clinically integrated behavioral health referral network.
As a clinical researcher, I investigate behavioral health interventions in primary care and adapt CoCM for novel patient populations (e.g., ambulatory palliative and supportive care). As an educator, I lecture undergraduates on the delivery of mental health care, mentor graduate students and fellows in health services scholarship, and train resident physicians across psychiatry, primary care, and preventive medicine in behavioral health interventions.
A recurring theme in integrated care is that leadership can emerge from many disciplines—physicians, advanced practice providers, nurses, psychologists, social workers, licensed counselors, administrators, and more. I believe CFHA should develop programs that explicitly nurture leadership potential across all professional backgrounds in service of our shared vision.
Strategic Priority: Building Cross-Sector Partnerships
The multi-faceted nature of my professional identity makes my work exciting, but early in my career, I hesitated to join CFHA because it was unclear whether my background—particularly as a physician—was fully welcomed. I am grateful to have challenged that assumption, as CFHA has since become a professional home that enriches my work.
My past experience and professional reach positions me well to leverage relationships across disciplines to grow CFHA’s diversity and membership. Within my current work, I have:
- Created a role for clinical pharmacists and trainees to participate in weekly Palliative Medicine CoCM case conferences.
- Partnered with medical assistants to enhance screening quality and involve them in new targeted screening initiatives (e.g., opioid use disorder, trauma-related disorders).
- Established monthly check-ins with primary care site administrative leaders to support the sustainability and human resources driving integrated behavioral health.
As a Board Member, I would welcome the opportunity to scope and launch engagement initiatives or working groups focused on these often-underrepresented stakeholders, with the goal of stimulating organic growth and strengthening CFHA’s integrated care network.
CFHA has shaped my career and enriched my vision for integrated care. It would be a privilege to help guide its next chapter.
1. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI): DEI is a strategic and valued priority for the CFHA Board of Directors. Please answer the following questions to the best of your ability. How do you define Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion? From your vantage point, in what ways do you see DEI challenges at CFHA? If you had the chance to help CFHA become more agile with DEI skills, what would that look like?
I define Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as a deliberate commitment to recognize and value the unique identities, experiences, and needs of all individuals, while actively dismantling systemic barriers that contribute to disparities in access, opportunity, and outcomes. DEI entails fostering a healthcare environment in which all individuals—regardless of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, geography, age, or other factors—are respected, supported, and empowered to receive equitable, high-quality care.
Throughout my nearly two decades of experience in behavioral health integration, I have observed how systemic inequities limit timely access to mental health services for marginalized populations. Despite extensive professional networks and expertise, I frequently encounter challenges in securing appropriate, community-based care for those in need, underscoring the pervasive gaps within our system.
Within CFHA, I perceive DEI challenges in ensuring that the organization’s membership, programming, and advocacy reflect and effectively serve the diverse populations disproportionately affected by mental health disparities. To enhance CFHA’s agility in DEI, I would advocate for integrating equity frameworks into all strategic initiatives and board-level decision-making, fostering ongoing education on cultural humility and implicit bias, and expanding outreach to underrepresented clinicians and communities. Moreover, I would emphasize the use of data to identify gaps and disparities in care to inform actionable, equity-centered policies and practices.
2. Engaging CFHA: Please describe unique ways you and your work will impact CFHA. What else would you consider advocating for CFHA’s future? What makes you uniquely suited to represent our membership on the Board of Directors?
My professional background uniquely integrates clinical expertise, health system leadership, and policy advocacy. Beginning my career in emergency and inpatient psychiatry, I gained firsthand insight into the limitations of fragmented mental healthcare and the critical need for integrated models of care. In leadership roles, I have successfully spearheaded the implementation and expansion of evidence-based interventions such as the Collaborative Care Model across multiple states, improving access and quality of care.
I bring a comprehensive perspective that spans direct patient care, operational strategy, academic scholarship, and health policy, positioning me to contribute meaningfully to CFHA’s growth and influence. I am committed to fostering cross-sector partnerships that include physicians, non-clinical professionals, and other medical team members, recognizing that collaboration is essential for sustainable and systemic improvements.
My dedication to promoting equitable access to mental healthcare, particularly for children, aging populations, and underserved communities, aligns closely with CFHA’s mission. I intend to advocate for continued innovation in care delivery, workforce development, and policy initiatives that center equity and community engagement. Through my national network and experience collaborating with diverse stakeholders, I aim to elevate CFHA’s role as a leader in integrated behavioral health.
3. Strategic priorities: The CFHA Board of Directors has identified the following issues as key priorities for the coming year. Please select one of these issues and speak to your experience and expertise in the area and how you might help advance this key issue on behalf of CFHA. Health equity and integrated care: subject matter and/or policy experience OR Building cross-sector partnerships: strategies to grow membership beyond behavioral health clinicians and to include physicians, non-clinical members, and other medical team members (Pharmacists, Clinic Managers, Medical Assistants)
Among CFHA’s identified strategic priorities, advancing health equity through integrated care aligns most closely with my expertise and professional commitment. I have led efforts to assist health systems nationwide in adopting the Collaborative Care Model, a rigorously studied framework that embeds behavioral health services within primary care settings to improve access, clinical outcomes, and patient satisfaction, particularly for underserved populations.
In my current role at the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute, I provide technical assistance and implementation support focused on data-driven, measurement-informed care strategies that enhance equity and reduce readmissions. Additionally, I actively engage in policy advocacy to reform reimbursement structures, such as supporting the Complete Care Act, which incentivizes integrated behavioral health expansion under Medicare.
If elected, I would leverage my clinical, operational, and policy expertise to advance CFHA’s efforts in promoting equitable, integrated care models, supporting workforce development, and fostering policies that address health disparities. I am confident these efforts will improve health outcomes for diverse populations and strengthen the behavioral health system as a whole.
1. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) question: DEI is a strategic and valued priority for the CFHA Board of Directors. Please answer the following questions to the best of your ability. How do you define Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion? From your vantage point, in what ways do you see DEI challenges at CFHA? If you had the chance to help CFHA become more agile with DEI skills, what would that look like?
Fairness is central to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion and is foundational to my core values. I strongly believe that the concepts of diversity, equity and inclusion are not an absolute, but dynamic concepts that continue to evolve. Diversity not only encompass the differences and similarities among groups but also focuses on the variety of core values and intersectionality of identities within and between groups. While recognizing that each person has a different historical/personal context, practicing equity helps address that imbalance and brings fairness in addressing disparities between individual social contexts. The concepts of equity and inclusion go hand in hand. As equity allows systems to address imbalance, it also helps improve the sense of belongingness despite individual/group differences.
I have been co-chair of the Just Medicine Committee (JMC) since January of 2024. During my tenure, I have noticed sincere efforts by CFHA leadership to improve the sense of belongingness within CFHA. The leadership supported a fellowship position for JMC and held focus groups both in person and virtual to understand the membership and the needs of CFHA community. While as a committee we have made efforts to advance CFHA’s mission to promote diversity, inclusion and equity within the organization, this effort does not come without challenges. Despite leadership initiatives and JMC’s efforts the community engagement from CFHA membership remains low. If offered the opportunity to be part of CFHA board of directors, I would work with other board members to improve community engagement, have a better understanding of CFHA membership and strategies to improve diversity of our membership and recognition that intersectionality of professions is essential for fostering inclusivity.
2. Engaging CFHA: Please describe unique ways you and your work will impact CFHA. What else would you consider advocating for CFHA’s future? What makes you uniquely suited to represent our membership on the Board of Directors?
As an immigrant, a woman of color, a former family physician, and a current primary care behavioral health psychologist, I bring my unique lens to problem solving with an appreciation of multiculturalism and inequities. Over the past five years I have consistently gained experience in my leadership skills as the director of integrated behavioral health. The integrated behavioral health program I direct is affiliated with a medical school that is a national leader in primary care education and a department of Family Medicine that has 30-year record of advancing the integration of behavioral health and primary care. In this position, I have learned to manage larger scale integrated behavioral health clinical operations, financial nuances of behavioral health in primary care, and interprofessional team management. I have also integrated a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse practitioner Fellowship in Family Medicine to address the need for qualified psychiatric prescribers within integrated care settings. In addition, I also maintain my clinical practice at a family medicine residency site located in a community that is designated as medically underserved. The population that I serve is a true blend of multiculturalism representing migrant population from South central America, Haiti, Hmong population from Cambodia, and migrants from the continent of Africa.
My clinical, teaching, and leadership experience has prepared me well to take this new challenge and work at a national level to address the needs of the people we serve, bring a solution focused lens and a desire to work alongside inter and intra professional colleagues at CFHA.
3. Strategic priorities: The CFHA Board of Directors has identified the following issues as key priorities for the coming year. Please select one of these issues and speak to your experience and expertise in the area and how you might help advance this key issue on behalf of CFHA. Building cross-sector partnerships: strategies to grow membership beyond behavioral health clinicians and to include physicians, non-clinical members, and other medical team members (Pharmacists, Clinic Managers, Medical Assistants)
Over the years of experience in integrated behavioral health and my experience as a physician puts me in a unique position to serve as a liaison between two professions. Given my personal experience, I strongly believe in cross-sector collaborations and initiatives to address health disparities and encompass whole person health. The strength of any organization lies within the diversity of core values and knowledge, inter and intra professional expertise. CFHA has made some significant strides to collaborate with American Medical Association to advance integrated care and interprofessional collaboration at an organizational level. Therefore, it is imperative that CFHA continue to expand its wings beyond Psychologists, Psychiatrists and Family Physicians. If offered this position, I will support CFHA medical directors in their meaningful work to bring together medical professionals across diverse integrated care settings. I will also advocate for strategies to increase CFHA’s organizational membership and making an outreach effort to cross sector professionals on CFHA’s mission and the value of their collaboration.
I am a seasoned healthcare leader with over 32 years of experience, driving excellence in clinical operations and health system management. As the Medical Operations Manager at Methodist Healthcare Ministries, I bring a deep commitment to quality care, strategic leadership, and operational integrity.
I hold a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in Nursing with an emphasis in Leadership from the University of the Incarnate Word. My educational foundation, combined with decades of frontline and managerial experience, enables me to lead multidisciplinary teams with clarity, compassion, and purpose.
Throughout my career, I have been recognized for my unwavering dedication to ethical practice and organizational excellence. I am particularly passionate about advancing Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging in healthcare settings and am a firm believer in “doing the right thing— and doing it all the time.”
My leadership philosophy centers on empowering others, driving systemic improvement, and fostering environments where patients and staff alike can thrive.
I am honored to submit my candidacy for the Collaborative Family Healthcare Association (CFHA) Board of Directors. Throughout my career, I have seen how integrated, team-based care can transform lives. I also know firsthand how easily individuals and families can be left behind when systems fail to recognize the barriers they face. Language differences, immigration status, and cultural misunderstandings often stand between patients and the care they need—and addressing these inequities is at the heart of my professional mission.
My commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is rooted in both experience and conviction. I have worked closely with families who navigate the healthcare system while facing significant barriers, and I understand the courage and resilience it requires. These encounters have shaped my belief that equitable healthcare must go beyond good intentions; it must actively dismantle barriers to access and ensure that every individual feels seen, heard, and valued.
On the CFHA Board, I will work to:
- Elevate the voices of patients and providers from immigrant and linguistically diverse communities.
- Integrate equity-centered practices into collaborative care models, ensuring teams can meet patients where they are, regardless of background or circumstance.
- Foster opportunities for underrepresented professionals to contribute to CFHA leadership, scholarship, and innovation.
I believe CFHA is uniquely positioned to lead the field in advancing integrated, family-centered care that is not only collaborative but also truly inclusive. I would be honored to contribute my perspective and passion for equity to the CFHA Board, helping the organization continue to dismantle systemic barriers and build a healthcare system where all families can thrive.
1. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)
To me, diversity means honoring and embracing the breadth of human experiences, identities, and perspectives; equity means creating structures that actively address systemic barriers so that all individuals have genuine access to opportunities; and inclusion means cultivating a culture where people feel seen, valued, and empowered to contribute fully. From my vantage point, CFHA has made important strides toward DEI, yet challenges remain in amplifying diverse voices in leadership, ensuring global perspectives are integrated into our conversations, and moving beyond representation to true systemic transformation.
If given the opportunity to help CFHA become more agile with DEI skills, I would focus on developing reflective spaces and capacity-building initiatives that support members in engaging with equity work in tangible ways. This would include facilitating ongoing dialogue across cultural, geographic, and professional lines, integrating trauma-informed and systemic approaches into our DEI practices, and ensuring mentorship pathways for emerging professionals from historically underrepresented backgrounds.
2. Engaging CFHA
My work has consistently bridged clinical practice, education, and research in integrated care, with an emphasis on relational, systemic, and trauma-informed approaches. I believe my contributions can impact CFHA by bringing forward innovative ideas on how AI, technology, and systemic therapy can intersect to support equity and access in integrated care settings. I would advocate for CFHA to expand its reach by investing in mentorship networks, building stronger connections with international partners, and creating more resources for interdisciplinary teams that include physicians, nurses, medical assistants, and behavioral health providers.
What makes me uniquely suited to represent the membership is my dual lens as both a clinician and an academic leader. I bring experience working nationally and internationally in couples and family therapy, medical family therapy, and integrated behavioral health. I also bring a deep commitment to mentoring emerging clinicians and researchers, advocating for inclusive practices, and integrating innovation into care delivery.
3. Strategic Priorities
I am particularly drawn to the strategic priority of Health Equity and Integrated Care. My expertise in systemic therapy and medical family therapy equips me to think relationally about health disparities and to design approaches that address the biopsychosocial-spiritual needs of patients. My research and clinical work with families facing chronic illness, as well as my current projects exploring AI in behavioral health, have reinforced for me that health equity cannot be achieved without addressing structural inequities, building culturally responsive models of care, and engaging multiple sectors.
I would help CFHA advance this priority by contributing to cross-disciplinary collaborations that bring together behavioral health providers, physicians, policy advocates, and patients to co-create equitable models of integrated care. I would also emphasize training and dissemination strategies that equip our membership with the tools to implement equity-focused integrated practices in diverse contexts.
1. How do you define Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion? From your vantage point, in what ways do you see DEI challenges at CFHA? If you had the chance to help CFHA become more agile with DEI skills, what would that look like?
I am a Caucasian, cisgendered, separated, Jewish woman, a doctorally-prepared family therapist, and a mother who is parenting an adolescent daughter while also caregiving a 90-year-old mother with cognitive impairment who lives several states away. My definitions of diversity, equity, and inclusion are built on a foundation of valuing the principle of intersectionality, the complex matrix of places we have privilege and places where we feel othered, and the ways that complexity shapes our lived experience. Many aspects of my being carry tremendous privilege, especially the more outward or visible ones. The value of diversity to me is related to why I subscribe so strongly to an interprofessionalism framework in my teaching, my clinical work, and my leadership; there is real danger in being in an echo chamber where the only sounds that can be heard are those belonging to the most powerful, whether around a treatment team table or in our conference rooms or in our exam rooms or in our classrooms. I have been trained (long before I entered graduate school) to understand that power and privilege are not ‘fairly’ or equitably distributed, and that those who have them, wherever we have them, have a responsibility to use them ethically and to make just what has been done unfairly. Equity is stepping back to make room, waiting to allow others to speak first and earnestly, welcoming experiences and ways of thinking and differences not only for the sake of the difference but because in so doing it enables us to learn and grow together. Diversity is the recognition that my experience alone is just that, and that curiosity about those of others helps us make meaning, build connection, enrich how we see and experience one another, create conflict about what has always been, and invite intention about what should be. Inclusion is the intention I set to invite, welcome, make possible, share space, potentiate access, adapt what and how I do so that others can do, too. And the point of it all? To maximize connection and engagement, to minimize injustice and inequity, to enliven the places we live and work and play and teach and learn, to heal what has been broken well before we got here, and to make sure that what we leave is better than what we got.
CFHA is perfectly poised to wrestle with the idea that our intersectional identities are a mixed bag, and may benefit from more authentic conversations about those identities. I wish for CFHA to become more nimble and courageous with how we talk about the rooms we sit and practice and teach in, how we leverage power and voice and privilege, how we notice hierarchy and understand how others may believe it works, but resist accepting so many of those narratives for and about ourselves. I’m not a physician but work in academic medicine and have leadership roles that impact and influence; I often read rooms and make quick assessments about how who and how I am may “play” to others, largely because so many of the things that define who I am (and who I’m not) are poorly understood and at times undervalued by many others in those rooms. But I also see the place where I have power, and privilege. We are responsible to craft those narratives for ourselves, about ourselves, and with others. As an organization, I’d love to hear more, have more, conversation about the complexity of all of it, the intersection of our privilege and our marginalization, both, and the opportunities we have to model the ability to hold and be connected through them.
If I had a chance to help CFHA become more agile, I would promote more the framework of intersectional identities, interprofessional complexities, real relationships as a vehicle for exploring these and promoting safety in our teams, and tools for leading, teaching, and practicing with this lens.
2. Engaging CFHA: Please describe unique ways you and your work will impact CFHA. What else would you consider advocating for CFHA’s future? What makes you uniquely suited to represent our membership on the Board of Directors?
My work at our academic health center includes several key leadership roles in two clinical departments where one of my primary guiding values is that of interprofessional education and practice. Integrated care is where I began my career 20 years ago. And the longer I have practiced in and built integrated primary and specialty care practices across our enterprise, the more I can see the tremendous limitations of what our teams *could* be because of how separately so many of us train and learn our crafts. While I know that CFHA has a partnership with the IPC Institute, I think the organization would benefit from becoming more integrated into additional IPE spaces for establishing and refining core competencies, prioritizing the experiences and voice of our patients and families, and rolling up our sleeves to help inculcate others in our teams around the value of interprofessionalism.
As for what makes me uniquely suited to serve on our Board, I am by birth and by training a systems thinker and intervener. I am strategic and curious and solution oriented. I am attentive to process. I am someone who deeply respects our roots and our histories, and also understands the need for constant adaptation and evolution. I have been told that the recent Harvard Business Review publication describing “super facilitators” describes some of my best attributes in a group: I am a person who can “integrate diverse expertise, promote equitable contributions, and cultivate trust”, and someone who believes (and actualizes) the idea that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.
3. Strategic priorities: The CFHA Board of Directors has identified the following issues as key priorities for the coming year. Please select one of these issues and speak to your experience and expertise in the area and how you might help advance this key issue on behalf of CFHA.
As for the Board’s key priorities for growth in the coming year, I am most drawn to growing membership and engagement beyond behavioral health. The vast majority of my career has been spent NOT with others in behavioral health so much as those from other disciplines who a) may understand the value of our perspective but not know how best to integrate it; b) may wish to learn and implement clinical skills that reflect our “wheelhouse”; and c) may be situated to really help us address health equity, access, and the health of populations by being at the table together. Some of my proudest moments as an educator have included training dozens of nurse care managers, pharmacists, and medical social workers in our hospital’s ACO around brief behavioral interventions they can use in their patient care visits, especially for those with a high degree of complexity and comorbidity. They have also included consistently being a beacon for all of us working to the tops of our licenses, not by turfing or jettisoning aspects of care to others, but by learning and integrating more in our own practices (esp for my physician and nurse practitioner colleagues). And as a communications and leadership coach, I have strived to reach others and entice them to adopt more “behavioral health” strategies in their operating rooms, faculty meetings, C-suite strategic plans, precepting relationships, and ambulatory care exam rooms. But in order for us to continue to evolve our desire to promote high functioning, patient-centered teams, some of those same people need to be invited to join us, to learn with us, and to vision with us.
One way I might promote this area of growth might be through the annual conference, potentially incentivizing or prioritizing abstracts that bring non-BH presenters and not-yet-members into the sessions as presenters, but also through our special interest groups (which are always topically relevant and also often overwhelmingly attended by BH members). Shared leadership of these groups, or shared presenting on topics/sessions of mutual/wide interest, may be vehicles to bring more of our colleagues from nursing, pharmacy, medicine, rehab, and beyond. Finally, including more team-based presentations that make it possible to include medical assistants, front end and administrative staff, could help us walk the talk many of us pride ourselves on; I do anticipate that part of the feasibility here may depend on supporting engagement/attendance/membership at rates that are accessible for members of our teams whose earnings don’t even come close to those of many of us.
1). Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) question: DEI is a strategic and valued priority for the CFHA Board of Directors. Please answer the following questions to the best of your ability. How do you define Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion? From your vantage point, in what ways do you see DEI challenges at CFHA? If you had the chance to help CFHA become more agile with DEI skills, what would that look like?
Diversity is the things that makes us different. These things include but are not limited to your ethnic backgrounds, education level, experiences, differentiated thinking, etc. On a micro level, these are all of the sauces that makes a person unique. On a macro level, diversity uses everyone’s special sauce and emphasizes that there is a place for them and that they are the special ingredient to the successful functioning of an organization and their culture.
Equity is the commitment to providing fair access, opportunities, and resources for all individuals, especially those who have been historically marginalized. It is understanding that not everyone has been afforded the same level of opportunities, therefore, we must be intentional and strategic about the pathways and resources we provide so that everyone can have a better chance to gaining access to these opportunities.
Inclusion is the implementation of diversity and equity. It is the practice of creating an environment where everyone feels welcomed, respected, and valued for their unique contributions. It’s the active process of ensuring that all voices are heard, and that diverse perspectives are genuinely integrated into decision-making and organizational culture.
From my perspective, some of the key DEI challenges at CFHA relate to both access and representation.
• Financial and Logistical Barriers: A significant challenge is the limited financial support for attendees, especially for minority students and early-career professionals. My personal experience as a single mother who has struggled with the financial burden of attending the conference highlights how these barriers can prevent qualified individuals from participating and presenting their work.
• Limited Representation in Programming: While there may be some minority representation in leadership, the overall conference programming and workshops could be more inclusive of a wider range of cultural backgrounds and professional roles. I observed a need for more opportunities that specifically promote diverse cultures and include voices from key community roles, such as community health workers and peer support specialists. A truly inclusive environment should make space for these essential, yet often overlooked, contributors.
Recommendations for Agility and Improvement
To help CFHA become more agile with its DEI skills, I would propose enhancing accessibility and broadening programs.
• Enhance Accessibility: I would advocate for the creation of a dedicated DEI sponsorship fund to help offset conference costs for students and individuals from underrepresented backgrounds. This fund could be supported through donor contributions and a portion of registration fees. We could also explore offering more virtual or hybrid attendance options to reduce travel and accommodation expenses.
• Broaden Programming: I’d suggest forming a collegiate DEI advisory committee to help curate a more inclusive slate of workshops and presentations. I would also suggest intentional safe spaces during the conference and including workshops for C-Suite level executives that gives them ideas on how to successfully design and implement DEI programming
2). Engaging CFHA: Please describe unique ways you and your work will impact CFHA. What else would you consider advocating for CFHA’s future? What makes you uniquely suited to represent our membership on the Board of Directors?
My unique impact on CFHA will stem from my passion for health equity and my track record of building innovative programs that connect underserved communities with vital resources. I will not just serve on the Board; I will actively work to bridge the gap between CFHA’s academic and clinical focus and the grassroots efforts in communities that are on the front lines of care.
Looking toward the future, I would advocate for CFHA to become a more agile and accessible organization for students and early-career professionals. This would involve launching a mentorship program that pairs experienced CFHA members with emerging leaders from diverse backgrounds. Additionally, I would be interested in working together to acquire funding to establish a scholarship program that would specifically support minority students and single parents who are interested in integrated healthcare but face financial barriers to attending conferences or participating in professional development especially if they are presenters.
My qualifications go beyond my passion and professional experience. What makes me uniquely suited to represent the membership is my ability to connect with people from all walks of life. My work on boards for organizations such as Minority Recovery, Black Mental Health Village, and The Cambridge Women’s Center has taught me how to develop programs that are both innovative and deeply rooted in community needs.
I am a natural bridge-builder. I can establish rapport quickly and think in a solution- oriented manner. This skill set, combined with my personal journey, allows me to be a voice for the members who are often unheard. I am not just a representative; I am a trusted advocate who has lived many of the challenges our members face. My perspective will ensure that CFHA’s strategic decisions are inclusive and truly representative of our diverse membership.
3). Strategic priorities: The CFHA Board of Directors has identified the following issues as key priorities for the coming year. Please select one of these issues and speak to your experience and expertise in the area and how you might help advance this key issue on behalf of CFHA.
Health equity and integrated care: subject matter and/or policy experience OR Building cross- sector partnerships: strategies to grow membership beyond behavioral health clinicians and to
| include physicians, non-clinical members, and other medical team members (Pharmacists, Clinic Managers, Medical Assistants)
From January 2024 to May 2024, I was able to intern at the Substance Abuse Mental Health Service Administration (SAMHSA) in the Office of Chief Medical Officer. During my time there I was able to assist with the creation of KPIs for a grant that provided funding to increase cross- functional workforce in integrated behavioral health. This work required me to:
• Collaborate across disciplines: I worked with diverse teams, including grant administrators, policy experts, and clinical professionals. This experience gave me firsthand insight into the unique language, priorities, and needs of various sectors within healthcare.
• Translate goals into measurable outcomes: I helped to translate the broad goal of expanding the workforce into concrete, measurable objectives. This skill is directly applicable to CFHA’s goal of growing its membership. We could use a similar framework to define, measure, and track our success in engaging physicians, pharmacists, and other medical team members.
• Understand policy-to-practice implementation: I gained a clear understanding of how federal policy and funding can be leveraged to drive change on the ground. This knowledge would be invaluable in developing strategies to attract members from sectors that may not traditionally engage with CFHA.
My time at SAMHSA has equipped me with the unique skills to not only understand the why behind cross-sector partnerships but also the how—the practical, strategic, and collaborative steps needed to build them effectively.
