Sherry Pace, MBA, CEO, Chicago Family Health, CSAC co-chair

How did you become interested in health equity and public health?

I’m from Cleveland originally. I have a degree in Health Administration. My first real job in healthcare was at an FQHC that started out as Hough Norwood – if you know about the Hough riots, it was a community health center that grew out of that period in the 60s. It was then called Cleveland Neighborhood Health Services, Inc–I just knew that it was the clinic in my neighborhood. I ended up working at one on the other side of town, because it was a network of clinics across Cleveland that worked on a sliding fee scale and helped serve those who are underserved and underinsured.

Cleveland, like many parts of Chicago, is diverse and diverse in how wealth is distributed and so a lot of folks in the city have those barriers and face social determinants of health–we used to just call them Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. When people are concerned about where they’re going to get food, they aren’t necessarily concerned about getting transportation to get to the doctor to take their medication like they’re supposed to. So I just always ended up in roles and in organizations that really went the extra mile to help folks who had those barriers.

Eventually I went back to school and got my Master’s Degree and worked in physician practice management at one of the two major hospital systems in Cleveland. They always say if you have insurance you go to Cleveland Clinic–if you don’t have insurance, you go to University Hospital. University Hospital wasn’t the county hospital, but it was the hospital that saw a lot of the patients that the clinic would not see. I worked there in various capacities for about 10 years and then took an opportunity in Flint, Michigan as a chief operating officer at an FQHC in the middle of the water crisis.

In most FQHCs, many of the people who work there are people from the neighborhood– a lot of the medical assistants, even the providers, might be people who grew up in that community and came back to the neighborhood and wanted to serve their community. So we had a provider who grew up in Flint and came back to serve at the FQHC that they were familiar with.

I worked there for five years, so I went during the water crisis and left during COVID. When you’re working in community and health care, you know every day that people don’t have insurance, they don’t have access, and they don’t have the resources that they need. COVID let everybody else know that that was a problem, so there were resources made available, but the need has always been there.

What brought you to Chicago? 

I’ve always loved Chicago. I have family here. There was an opportunity to be COO at Chicago Family Health, so I threw my hat in the ring. Then the CEO decided to retire six months later.

How does Chicago compare to Cleveland and Flint?

The neighborhoods are very similar: disenfranchised, disinvested. Chicago Family is on the south side of Chicago. The red line ends at 95th–we’re at 92nd and Exchange. It’s almost like you’re cut off from the rest of the city so there’s certain pockets of the city that are cut off from the beautiful skyline and the river and the architectural tours and all the great things that people love about Chicago, me included. But this is a neighborhood that is very similar to one that I’ve worked in in Flint, that I’ve worked in in Cleveland, and quite frankly one that I grew up in in Cleveland.

Does it feel like any progress has been made in terms of giving people access to care or addressing the needs that they have? 

I try to make sure that we put those things in place because I know the importance of that. I have had family members who have needed the kind of resources that we offer in the FQHC environment, whether that’s linkage to insurance, linkage to transportation, linkage to mental health providers or resources, rent assistance. In Flint, we had water distribution every week. When we had COVID, we were one of the first out there with vaccines–community health centers were main distribution points.

How did you become involved with C3EN?

As the prior CEO of Chicago Family Health was leaving, I guess he had been kind of tapped to see if he was interested, and he thought that I would be a good fit given that I had worked with researchers at University Hospital and had worked with the University of Michigan health system, which was one of our partners at our FQHC in Flint.

What I have liked is the opportunity to shed some positive light on research in conjunction with community health centers and our patient population and getting the word out to break down some of those myths and suspicions that can run rampant in our community.

How have your experiences with research been?

When I was in Flint working with the University of Michigan, we made it very clear that this was a community that had a low level of trust, not only in research but with a big academic medical center 60 miles down the road. We had a lot of conversations and built relationships that developed into trust. We had to trust them as an organization in order to get our patients to trust them. In addition, we wanted to make sure that we gave opportunities for patients to be involved in that research–not just as subjects but as folks who did recruitment, as folks who participated in data collection and things like that. That was always beneficial and helped people want to participate because they saw or heard of what kind of experiences other people in the community had.

Chicago Family Health has had a great opportunity with the PTSD project that we’re working on, PORTAL-PTSD. It is an opportunity not only for our patients to get screened for trauma but also gives us an opportunity for funding support for behavioral health in our network. That is going to be beneficial for our patients in the long run, so our being an example of how that can be successful and beneficial to community and to the organizations involved will be good for other organizations to see.

Can you tell me about your new role in the CSAC? 

This year we went to three co-chairs: me, Steve Epting, and Tonya Roberson. I’m hoping that the CSAC continues to shed light on how community health centers can participate in the research that is being done. We want to see investment so that things can be equitable. We want to make sure that we have the tools and resources that we need so that we can overcome the barriers that our patients face that lead to them having poor outcomes. When folks go to medical school and they want to match, or they graduate and they want to move to Chicago, they don’t think of the south side of Chicago. Having opportunities for research might be the opportunity for them to find out what community health is all about.

What are you most proud of in your career?

I’m the most proud of being a leader who is of service to a community that is similar to one that I come from.