October 3, 2002 | Read Time: 1 minute
To Give Their Gifts: Health, Community, and Democracy
by Richard A. Couto, with Stephanie C. Eken
In this collection of profiles, award-winning leaders of community-health programs describe how they use their programs to pursue social justice.
Richard A. Couto, a professor of leadership studies at the Jepson School of the University of Richmond, in Virginia, interviewed 12 recipients of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Community Health Leadership Program awards, each chosen based on their creative solution to problems of health care and social and economic inequality.
Chapters describe each leader’s story and approach to a particular health-care problem, as well as social-justice goals they work to achieve. Leaders profiled include Peter Lee, who founded the South Carolina–based Ecumenical AIDS Ministry, which is made up of “care teams” of volunteers from various religious denominations who provide support services to people who have contracted HIV or AIDS; and Lorelei DeCora, who set up the first community-health center organized and directed by Native Americans, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
Other featured leaders describe their work on health issues such as access to primary care, drug and alcohol addictions, disabilities, homelessness, and school-based health care.
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press, 112 21st Avenue South, Suite 201, University Plaza, Nashville, Tenn. 37203; (615) 322-3585; fax (615) 343-8823; vupress@vanderbilt.edu; 238 pages; $24.95; I.S.B.N. 0-8265-1411-1.
