Staff
Tim Berthold
Chair, Department of Health Education, 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.
Jose Ramon Fernandez-Pena
Director, Welcome Back Initiative
Co-Director, Community Health Works
Jose Ramon Fernandez-Pena, 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. Fernandez-Pena
worked with the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation in the areas of
Quality Management, Medical Affairs, and Planning.
Dr. Fernandez-Pena 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
Chair and Professor received her Doctoral Degree from the
School of Public Health at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in
1987. Under her stewardship
the Department has emerged as campus leaders in grant funded, applied
community-based research.
The growth of the Department reflects strategic decisions to: mount a
Master of Public Health Degree; integrate holistic health; strengthen the
social relevance of the degrees; diversify the faculty beyond health education
to include health policy, administration, social epidemiology, health
psychology and holistic health; and mount a curriculum that emphasizes civic
engagement and practice-based education. A long history of successful
innovation in pedagogy and curriculum Dr. Love has been the recipient of three
prestigious grants from the Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary
Education. In 1989, Dr. Love founded Community Health Works of San Francisco (CHW)
a fruitful partnership between SFSU and City College of San Francisco. Under
her leadership, CHW has raised over 17 million dollars from more than 18
different funders. Dr. Love has a
deep commitment to placing the University?s prodigious resources at the service
of a diverse New California and issues of health equity and social justice.
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.
