Awards

Believer in the power of together | Language Access Advocate | Community Connector | Change-maker

Vanessa Rodríguez is the Co-Director of the Community Engagement Coalition at LiveWell Greenville. In this role, she leads initiatives to strengthen relationships, build trust, and create opportunities that amplify community voices across Greenville County. She brings over 20 years of experience in communications and public relations to her work. Before relocating to Greenville, South Carolina, following Hurricane Maria, she lived in Puerto Rico, where she served as Director of Public Relations for the Commission for Women’s Affairs in the Governor’s Office, Director of Communications and Press for the Office of the Women’s Advocate, and Communications Consultant for the Autonomous Municipality of Caguas.

She values authenticity and strives to create spaces where people feel safe to be open, honest, and fully themselves. Her work is guided by a deep passion for justice, women’s rights, and community engagement. She is committed to advancing equity, amplifying historically marginalized voices, and fostering collaborative relationships that drive meaningful and sustainable change.

Vanessa is deeply committed to women’s empowerment, which led her to create the platform DESCALZA, where she provides support, shares hope, offers holistic development workshops, and engages in community service. Supporting Hispanic families and helping pave the way for those facing challenges she knows firsthand is one of her greatest motivations.

Outside of work, she enjoys supporting her son Lorenzo’s soccer team, traveling, running, and spending time with her husband Ángel, her family, and friends.

For nearly two decades, Gloria has devoted herself to supporting the Latino community, previously in New York and for the past seven years in South Carolina. Gloria has been promoting public health, mental health, and community engagement with compassion and dedication. As the Statewide Latinx Program Coordinator for Ending the HIV Epidemic, Gloria has worked to ensure culturally and linguistically appropriate education, prevention, and access to health services for people living with HIV were offered. Since learning her son was living with a mental health condition, she has been committed to educating herself and the community, while supporting others through South Carolina’s National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) bilingual educational programs, support groups, and advocacy.  In 2021, Orgullo Y Salud was started. Gloria was appointed Chair of the South Carolina Orgullo y Salud workgroup. Orgullo y Salud meetings are held monthly and is a welcoming space fostering leadership, collaboration, and empowerment to help Latino families thrive with dignity, knowledge, and hope.

Restore Justice advocates for fairness, humanity, and compassion throughout the Illinois criminal legal system, with a primary focus on those affected by extreme sentences as youth. We create and support policies that allow those who are rehabilitated to go home, and that ensure those incarcerated, their families, and victim families have opportunities for healing and justice. We engage people who are currently and formerly incarcerated and their loved ones, victims and their families, communities, and concerned Illinoisans in advocacy and service within the criminal legal system. Learn more: restorejustice.org

The mission of Hispanic Services Council (HSC) is to increase access and opportunities for Latinos and influence the systems that serve them. Founded in 1992, HSC has addressed the lack of access to services available to Latino immigrant families through bilingual and bicultural outreach, education, systems navigation, family support and immigration legal services.

Hispanic Services Council’s programs aim to promote the academic success of youth; increase parental engagement in the education of their children; reduce food and healthcare insecurity through benefits and insurance enrollment assistance; and promote paths to citizenship through affordable and quality immigration legal services. Our programs and services focus on addressing the barriers of access to educational, health and social services due to language limitations, immigration status or fear.

HSC is committed to lifting the voices that tell the stories of strength, resilience, and perseverance of the Latino community, as well as ensuring that Latinos have access to the resources and opportunities that help them to climb the socioeconomic ladder, be healthy and educated, develop social connections and to be civically engaged.

In 2013, The Anchorage Health Literacy Collaborative (TAHLC) partners teamed up with Alaska Literacy Program adult students to empower each other with reliable information pipelines and connections to community healthcare providers. Alaska Literacy Program and TAHLC partners created the Peer Leader Navigators (PLNs) to serve as information beacons in their communities, connecting their neighbors, friends, and families to vital health tips and community resources.

ALP’s Peer Leader Navigator (PLN) program trains multilingual people to be health and wellness information promoters within their familial, social, and cultural groups. PLNs become empowered with research methods and access to trustworthy information. They, in turn, empower their communities.

As a result of this initiative, educators, community partners, and healthcare providers are better able to meet traditionally underrepresented community members where they are; helping to provide vital information and services across Alaska. Ongoing partnerships help keep this mutually beneficial connection alive.

Shekhar Saxena, MD, is professor of practice of Global Mental Health at the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He worked with the World Health Organization (WHO), Geneva, for 20 years, the last of which he served as director of mental health and substance abuse. He was the technical lead within the WHO for the Mental Health Action Plan adopted by the World Health Assembly in 2013. Dr. Saxena is author of more than 350 academic papers. His expertise includes providing evidence-based advice and technical assistance to policy makers, businesses and civil society on mental health. He was a joint lead-editor of the Lancet Commission on Global Mental Health and Sustainable Development, 2018, and a member of GlobalMentalHealth@Harvard initiative. His areas of interest include public mental health policy, systems and social and economic determinants of mental health. He is an advisor to United for Global Mental Health and McKinsey Health Institute.

Victoria Ngo, PhD, is an associate professor of Community Health and Social Sciences at the City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy (CUNY SPH). She is also the director of the Center for Innovation in Mental Health at CUNY SPH, and Mental Health director of the Center for Immigrant, Refugee and Global Health at CUNY. Dr. Ngo also holds an adjunct scientist position at the RAND Corporation. Her research focuses on developing mental health interventions and implementation strategies to promote access and quality of care to ethnic minorities and underserved populations worldwide. She specializes in implementation strategies for mental health task-sharing and use of community participator methods to increase access to evidence-based mental health interventions and sustainable integration of mental health services into non-mental health settings including primary care, maternal health, HIV, cancer care, schools, and other community-based settings. As part of system transformation initiatives to address health inequities at NIH and RWJF, she is leading the Harlem Strong Mental Health and Economic Empowerment Collaborative to transform systems of care using a neighborhood-based collaborative care model to support integrating mental health and community-based services in housing, primary care, and community-based organization in Harlem.

Octavio N. Martinez, Jr., MD, MPH, MBA, DFAPA is executive director of the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health at the University of Texas at Austin. Martinez is also the associate chair for Faculty Development for the Dell Medical School Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, a professor Psychiatry at DMS, clinical provessor at the Steve Hicks School of Social Work, faculty affiliate of the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice in the School of Law, and adjunct professor of Psychiatry at the Long School of Medicine, UT Health San Antonio. Internationally, Martinez is a member of the Global Leadership Exchange. Nationally, he is a member of the Advisory Committee to the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a member of the American Psychiatric Association’s Structural Racism Accountability Committee and the APA’s Psychiatric Services Journal editorial board.

Frances Haugen, MBA, is an advocate for accountability and transparency in social media. She blew the whistle on Facebook’s practices of prioritizing company profits over public safety and putting people’s lives at risk. She has been an outspoken advocate in addressing the role of social media on the mental health of children and teens. Ms. Haugen has a degree in electrical and computer engineering from Olin College and an MBA from Harvard University. She is a specialist in algorithmic product management, having worked on ranking algorithms at Google, Pinterest, Yelp and Facebook. Since going public about Facebook, she has testified in front of the U.S. Congress, UK and EU Parliaments, the French Senate and National Assembly, and has engaged with lawmakers internationally on how to best address the negative externalities of social media platforms. Ms. Haugen is the author of The Power of One.

Lisa Sherman Luna, MA, is the executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC) and TIRRC Votes, its 501(c)(4) arm. In October 2015, she joined the TIRRC serving as the policy director for nearly five years before becoming the executive director. As the first Latina to lead the organization, she helped the organization weather the COVID-19 pandemic, grow its staff, and settle into its new headquarters in the heart of the immigrant and refugee community in Antioch. Ms. Luna has developed a successful track record in winning policy victories, convincing a Republican governor to continue welcoming refugees under the Trump era, terminating a rent-a-bed agreement with ICE, passing TIRRC’s first pro-immigrnat law extending professional licenses to a broader class of immigrants, and securing historic investments from the Nashville government in expansion of immigration legal services. Prior to joining the TIRRC, she worked in the international human rights field in New York, London, and Senegal.

Devi Soman is a doctoral candidate in the Planning, Design and Built Environment program with a focus on Architecture + Health at Clemson University. She is also a graduate assistant in the Center for Health Facilities Design and Testing. She has a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Architecture from Mumbai University in India and a post-graduate diploma in Hospital and Healthcare Management from Symbiosis International University. Her work focuses on different aspects of healthcare design. Most recently, she has examined diagnostic centers in public healthcare facilities in India. Through her dissertation study, The Impact of Free-Standing Birth Center (FSBC) Environments on Culturally Sensitive Care Experiences and Maternal Health Outcomes for BIPOC women, she explores community birth centers providing midwifery care to BIPOC women. The goal is to understand how the physical environment of the FSBC influences childbirth and culturally sensitive care experiences for birthing women from BIPOC communities and their birthing partners while supporting the staff.