Staff

Valerie Abaunza
Administrative Support Coordinator, Community Health Works

Since joining the organization in 2002, Valerie has provided overall assistance to the many departments of Community Health Works. She is currently a graduate student at San Francisco State University, working on her MS in Counseling, with a specialization in College Student Personnel Services.

Tim Berthold
Chair, Health Education and Community Health Studies Department,
City College of San Francisco
Executive Committee, Community Health Works

Tim Berthold is Chair and faculty member of the Health Education and Community Health Studies Department at City College. He has twenty years experience working with community-based health and human rights projects. He has worked with diverse communities in the Bay Area as well as in Central America, South Asia and North Africa. Tim has worked in the areas of reproductive health and sexuality; HIV/AIDS; violence prevention and recovery from trauma; child survival; tuberculosis control; cholera prevention and community management; training of health and human rights promoters; health care reform and advocacy for universal health care. Tim is interested in popular education and motivated by the desire to educate and support CCSF students to advocate for health and social justice in their own communities. He earned his B.A. from Brown University and his M.S.P.H. from Harvard University.

JoAnna DeVito-Larson
Business Administrator, Community Health Works

JoAnna Devito-Larson, has been the Business Administrator for Community Health Works for the past 5 years. Before joining Community Health Works, she worked in various administrative capacities at Mission Neighborhood Health Center.

José Ramón Fernández-Peña
Director, Welcome Back Initiative
Co-Director, Community Health Works

José Ramón Fernández-Peña, MD, MPA, is an associate professor at San Francisco State University's Department of Health Education. He is also the Co-director of Community Health Works and the director of the Welcome Back Initiative, a statewide demonstration project developed to assist internationally trained health professionals, in the process of re-entering the health workforce. Prior to this, he was director of Health Education at Mission Neighborhood Health Center (MNHC) in San Francisco, where he oversaw the health education activities in the women's clinic, the teen clinic, the adult medicine clinic, and the HIV clinic. Before coming to California, Dr. Fernández-Peña worked with the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation in the areas of Quality Management, Medical Affairs, and Planning.

Dr. Fernández-Peña holds an MD from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and a Master's in Public Administration from New York University. He has over 26 years of professional experience in primary care services from the perspectives of a provider, a professor and an administrator.

Linda Squires Grohe
Dean, School of Health & PE, John Adams Campus,
City College of San Francisco
Executive Committee, Community Health Works

In 1969 Linda Squires Grohe joined the faculty of the English Department at City College of San Francisco after teaching two years at Humboldt State University. Ms. Squires Grohe is a native San Franciscan and was thrilled to be returning home. Her career at the College has spanned 34 years and has included such positions as instructor, program coordinator, public relations director and administrator. Presently, she is the dean of the School of Health & PE as well as the John Adams Campus. In addition to her school and campus responsibilities, Ms. Squires Grohe oversees a number of grants. Welcome Back is a $2.1M grant that funds a center, located at the John Adams Campus, which is designed to help foreign born health care professionals develop career paths that build upon their skills, experience and education. The Nurse Workforce Initiative grant assists incumbent hospital employees to enroll in CCSF nursing programs. Ms. Squires Grohe is also very involved in her community. She serves on the Stonestown Family YMCA Board of Managers, is a member of the WIB/PIC Program Committee and the MOCD Citizens Committee on Community Development. When Ms. Squires Grohe has any extra time, she can be found on the golf course or reading a good book.

Vicki Legion
Co-Director, Community Health Works
Faculty, City College of San Francisco

For some time Vicki worked at the emergency departments at Highland Hospital in Oakland and St. Luke's in San Francisco. She saw much needless suffering among the patients, and felt the despair of the staff: "All we do is patch folk up and send them back to the same conditions that made them sick in the first place, so that they can turn around and come right back." Vicki has spent her life looking for solutions to that dilemma - both social justice and health solutions. She is energized by the fact that there are better ways to construct both societies and public health systems. She loves working with the great people who congregate around these tasks.

Since the age of 17, she has always squeezed school in among community-based work. She started at University of Chicago and finished her BA at New College of California. She did her public health training at University of Illinois at Chicago. She started a PhD at UC Berkeley but stopped once she realized she already had the job of her dreams!

In Chicago she was non-plussed to find that - even though she studied on the west side of town, in the midst of huge slums and cheek by jowl with Cook County Hospital - the public health program had little connection to solving problems of poverty, racism and health inequities. She's very happy now to be working with two institutions - City College of San Francisco and San Francisco State University - that actively support such engagement. The two institutions are close to the ground and home to the grassroots - the way it should be.   Vicki is also a faculty member in the Health Education and Community Health Studies Department at City College.

Mary Beth Love, PhD
Chair, Department of Health Education, San Francisco State University
Executive Committee, Community Health Works

Dr. Mary Beth Love is Chair and Professor, Department of Health Education, College of Health and Human Services, at San Francisco State University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, School of Public Health in Community Health Education. Dr. Love founded Community Health Works and is Principal Investigator on many of its initiatives. As Chair, Dr. Love manages a Department of fifteen faculty, providing both a Masters of Public Health and a Bachelor of Science in Community Health Education as well as a minor in Holistic Health. Dr. Love has been integrally involved in numerous projects aimed at diversifying the public health workforce. She has successfully developed innovative curriculum that strengthens public health practice skills and addresses the issue of diversifying the workforce. For example, she was pivotal in the development of the Master of Public Health Program at SFSU now in its ninth year and is the founder of the first academic preparation program for Community Health Workers in the country through Community Health Works.

Nancy Mullenax
Director, San Francisco Welcome Back Center
Executive Committee, Community Health Works

Nancy Alba Mullenax has been working on healthcare access issues for over 20 years in the areas of program implementation, research, and evaluation. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Tulane University, with a specialization in Medical Anthropology.   She is the Director of the San Francisco Welcome Back Center.

Janey Skinner, MPH
Director, Interior Bay RHORC
Executive Committee, Community Health Works

Janey Skinner is the Director of the Regional Health Occupations Resource Center (RHORC) at City College of San Francisco (CCSF).   In this role, she works with community colleges and employers to develop and diversify the health workforce.   As a curriculum developer, teacher and evaluator, her work has directly involved community health workers (CHWs) and other frontline health workers for some time.   On the faculty of CCSF since 2004, she has taught courses in the Trauma Prevention and Recovery Certificate and facilitated the development of a Health Education A.S. degree program.   She served on the board of the Latina Center in Richmond, CA, where among other things she conducted an evaluation of a grassroots CHW program focused on mental health.   For over two decades she has worked with organizations and institutions at the intersections of adult education, public health, community mobilization and leadership development, in both the U.S. and Latin America.   She has written handbooks on evaluation, community action, media and alliance-building.   She received her Masters in Public Health in Community Health Education from U.C. Berkeley.