Uplift Local Leadership

Hello Friends,

While the Healthcare Foundation’s strategic priorities have evolved since I served as Board Chair beginning in 2008, its impetus has remained the same: a commitment to health equity. Back then, we were fully focused on saving the Healdsburg Hospital. Those were the years of the capital campaign that, I’m happy to say, succeeded in retaining for our community this important institution.

Along the way, the Healthcare Foundation discovered a real need for funding and advocacy on behalf of local frontline organizations devoted to the health and wellness of our region’s most vulnerable communities. These organizations and clinics were leading the work, but were often under-resourced. 

This month’s theme strikes a chord with me, because uplifting leadership is in the DNA of the Healthcare Foundation. Our role is to support those who are already leading on the health equity front, as well as the aspirations of those who seek new opportunities to do so, including our scholarship awardees.

Below, we speak with Ellen Barnett, MD, PhD, director of outreach and program development at the Integrative Medical Clinic Foundation. Ellen tells us about IMCF’s recent project, funded by a grant from the Healthcare Foundation, to create a Spanish-language version of the Imagine You toolkit she created for frontline workers and community-based organizations in disaster response settings, designed to assist participants in “self capacity building while increasing their ability to respond to disaster and personal trauma.”

Also below, we have the first of two profiles for our 2023 Wetzel Awards. Named for two great philanthropists of our community, Maggie and Harry Wetzel of Alexander Valley Vineyards, the Wetzel Awards are one of the ways the Healthcare Foundation pays tribute to the outstanding leadership we have here in our region. This year, the Wetzel Community Leadership Award goes to Healdsburg’s own Dawnelise and Ari Rosen. 

Uplifting leadership means supporting the next generation of community leaders, too. The Healthcare Foundation’s Mental Health Talent Pipeline does just that while addressing the severe shortage of bilingual, bicultural therapists. I invite you to read on for an introduction to one of our latest MHTP scholarship recipients, Adriana Reyes, and the experience and compassion she brings to her chosen field.

Of course, none of this is possible without the compassionate, forward-looking support of community members like you. Thank you for helping to lead the way to health equity for northern Sonoma County.

Sincerely,

Mary Ellen Smith

---

Dr. Ellen Barnett Updates Us on Imagine You’s Spanish Translation Project

In March of 2022, Santa Rosa–based nonprofit Integrative Medical Clinic Foundation (IMCF) began developing a Spanish-language version of their acclaimed Imagine You program, supported by a $50,000 grant from the Healthcare Foundation.

Imagine You is a methodology created by Dr. Ellen Barnett, MD, PhD, geared to improving the personal capacity of providers and clients for addressing health goals. IMCF has been teaching the Imagine You program since 2012 to diverse populations including foster youth, homeless shelter workers, and low-income Latine parents. 

Moreover, since the wildfires in 2017 and after, Imagine You training has supported second responders—social service provider staff, disaster case managers, clergy, and volunteers—in promoting resilience among those impacted by the disasters.

The grant from the Healthcare Foundation underwrote an effort that was about more than merely translating materials into Spanish. The project involved working with cohorts of frontline bilingual and monolingual staff across three local nonprofit agencies providing mental health and wellness services: the Botanical Bus, Corazón Healdsburg, and La Familia Sana.

As IMCF Executive Director Cynthia Calmenson explained at the outset of the grant period:

In the social services and healthcare sector, there are many Latinx staff and volunteers, and yet we’ve always delivered our program in English because that’s what we had to work with. This funding is giving us the opportunity not just to translate our work but to make it culturally responsive. On our team we have three bilingual trainers—Claudia Leiva, Marie Rivera, and Isabel Tiemann—who are all from the social services sector. They’re also passionate educators dedicated to their community. These trainers are very well versed in our program in English and now they’re helping us adapt it, translate it, and deliver it to a Spanish-speaking audience.

Recently, we had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Barnett, now a retired family physician but still very much involved in the work of Imagine You, about the origins of the program and how the Spanish-language translation project continues to inform Imagine You’s structure as a whole. (The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

Full Article (9 min read)

---

Meet Mental Health Talent Pipeline Scholarship Awardee Adriana Reyes

In August, Adriana Reyes began her coursework in the University of San Francisco Santa Rosa’s counseling psychology department as one of three new graduate students supported by the Healthcare Foundation’s Mental Health Talent Pipeline scholarship program. 

The scholarship covers full-tuition and traineeship stipends for bilingual, bicultural students who are pursuing a Master of Arts degree at USF with a concentration in Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT) and who are committed to working in the mental health field in northern Sonoma County. 

Born and raised in Santa Rosa, Adriana is glad that she and her older brother grew up where they did. “For us it’s a really great place to be in terms of the Latino community,” she says. “It’s a huge part of me, this community.”

Giving back to her community was a practice and value developed early. “Seeing how my mom is and her mother, my grandmother, I think it just gets passed down those traits, wanting to help people,” she says.

As someone who grew up speaking Spanish at home with her parents (who immigrated from Mexico nearly four decades ago), Adriana readily empathizes with people navigating a new culture and a new language.

“I was an ESL learner until the third grade,” she recalls. “I still remember being in kindergarten and being asked to spell out my name. I was really nervous. I think because of such experiences I like to put myself in the shoes of people who experience that today.”

Adriana recently took time to speak with us further about the inspiration that has brought her to USF and a career as a bilingual and bicultural therapist in north county.

Full Article (4 min read)

---

Wetzel Community Leadership Award: Dawnelise and Ari Rosen

Meet Ari and Dawnelise Rosen, the recipients of this year’s Wetzel Community Leadership Award.

Ari and Dawnelise Rosen are familiar faces in Healdsburg, the place they have called home for more than 20 years. As proprietors over those years of two popular restaurants, Scopa and Campo Fina, and co-founders of Corazón Healdsburg, their lives are woven deeply into the fabric of the greater community.

The founding in 2011 of Scopa Has a Dream (officially launched as Corazón Healdsburg in 2016) was a bold, much needed initiative to address the disparities and inequities facing Healdsburg’s substantial, mostly low-income Latino population. Today, Corazón Healdsburg is a thriving hub of activity and an essential part of northern Sonoma County, supporting and creating greater opportunities for thousands of low-income families and individuals through a range of programs, direct services, community engagement, and disaster relief. 

The idea that two restaurateurs would turn their attention and direct their energies to opening the town’s first independent community services nonprofit geared to its Latine community is perhaps only surprising to those who don’t know Ari and Dawnelise. When we asked them who their role models were, they answered, “All people who give of themselves for the greater good of humanity. This includes, in the case of our parents, modeling that taking care of oneself is a key factor in a balanced and healthy life.”

For their years of creative, unstinting devotion to equity and justice as well as a balanced and healthy life for everyone in our region, the Healthcare Foundation is very pleased to recognize Ari and Dawnelise Rosen with the 2023 Wetzel Community Leadership Award.

The following is taken from a recent conversation with Ari and Dawnelise.

Full Article (3 min read)

---

2023 WETZEL AWARDS

Thursday, November 2nd 8:30-10:00am
Dry Creek Kitchen, Healdsburg

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Please join us for a celebratory breakfast reception and ceremony honoring this year’s Wetzel Community Leadership Award recipients Dawnelise and Ari Rosen and Spirit of Wetzel Award recipient Dra. Daniela Domínguez. These inspiring community leaders demonstrate extraordinary community leadership in support of health and wellness in our region.

Thank You to Our Sponsors

Community Health Sustainers

Community Health Builders

Community Health Supporters

Costeaux French Bakery