CCPH Consultants

From time to time, CCPH appoints Consultants who work with us on specific projects and programs.  Information about our current Consultants appears below. For information about CCPH staff, click here. For information about CCPH board members, click here.

Suzanne Cashman, Senior Consultant

Formally trained in health services research, evaluation and administration, Suzanne Cashman has spent the thirty years of her professional career teaching graduate courses in public health, conducting community-based evaluation research, and developing partnerships aimed at helping communities improve their health status. Currently, Dr. Cashman is an Associate Professor and Director of Community Health in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS). Also faculty for the University's Preventive Medicine Residency, Dr. Cashman has residency-related administrative/teaching responsibilities as well as leadership responsibilities for developing the Department's community health agenda. In addition, she carries out community-based evaluation research, leads several optional enrichment electives aimed at helping students understand the health care system and their city's health statistics, plays a leadership role in Worcester's healthy communities coalition, and teaches public health skills to medical students and residents, as well as students in the Graduate School of Nursing and the School of Public Health.

Dr. Cashman joined the UMMS faculty in 1999, after having spent the preceding decade developing and nurturing a community-oriented primary care (COPC) focused, interprofessional preventive medicine fellowship in Boston, MA. Funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation through its urban COPC national demonstration initiative, this project used the preventive medicine training template to launch a multi-professional training program aimed at teaching participants skills that would help them work collaboratively with communities to improve health.

Currently, Dr. Cashman serves as a Board and Executive Committee member of the Association for Prevention Teaching and Research; she is also president of the board of Community Partners, Inc. and is a Senior Consultant for CCPH. In 2004, she received the medical school's Educational Achievement Award and in 2007, the Women's Faculty Committee honored Dr. Cashman for outstanding community service. Suzanne discovered public health when she worked at a VISTA volunteer in Northeast Tennessee.

Working with CCPH, Dr. Cashman has co-edited the Curriculum Planning Guide entitled, Advancing the Healthy People 2010 Objectives Through Community-Based Education; taught in the introductory service-learning institute; and played a leadership role in developing a New England Regional CCPH Network. In her role as CCPH Senior Consultant, Dr. Cashman advises CCPH on health promotion and disease prevention issues and serves as a resource to the Healthy People Curriculum Task Force and the Paul Ambrose Health Promotion Student Leadership Symposium.

Kara Connors, Senior Consultant

Kara Connors, MPH is the former associate director of CCPH and has an extensive background in coordinating and designing competency-based faculty development training seminars for medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry and allied health professionals across the country. While at CCPH, she coordinated the Health Professions Schools in Service to the Nation Program, a national demonstration program of service-learning in the health professions.

Kara has widely published in the field of community-based health professions education, service-learning and faculty development and serves as a facilitator for national audiences in this area. Kara is also is an education consultant at Children's Hospital, Boston where she is directing the instructional design elements of a health promotion distance-learning program for maternal and child health educators. Kara edited CCPH's publications Advancing the Healthy People 2010 Objectives Through Community-Based Education: A Curriculum Planning Guide and A Toolkit for Faculty, Students and Community Leadership Committed to Achieving the Nation's Health Objectives Through Community-Campus Partnerships.

Elaine Drew, Senior Consultant

Elaine Drew, PhD is an Assistant Professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin, Department of Population Health, Division of Health and Society. As an applied medical anthropologist, her research orientation draws from participatory action research, anthropological holism, and the ecological model of health behavior to examine how individual, social, and structural factors shape health and illness. Her current teaching activities include instructing a foundations course for first year students in the PhD program in Public and Community Health and directing the Health Policy course for second year medical students.

Elaine's research activities focus on health inequities and include community-academic partnership projects on diabetes prevention and management among Latino communities in southeast Wisconsin, obesity and diabetes prevention among Alaska Natives in southwest Alaska, and a collaborative study that examines ethics review processes among a diverse national network of CBPR reviewers. Since 2005, Elaine has been a Department of Health and Human Services, National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NCMHD) Scholar. She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Kentucky.

Elmer Freeman, Senior Consultant

Elmer R. Freeman, MSW, PhD(c) is a CCPH senior consultant for the Health Disparities Service-Learning Collaborative. He has a long history of involvement with CCPH, including serving as past chair of the CCPH board of directors, planning committee member for the Community Partner Summit and senior consultant to the Engaged Institutions Initiative. His special areas of interest are in public health policy; disparities in health status of
minority populations; reform of the health care system; and community social and economic development.

Mr. Freeman is the Executive Director of the Center for Community Health Education Research and Service (CCHERS, pronounced "cheers"). CCHERS is a partnership to promote reform in health professions education, between Boston University School of Medicine, Northeastern University Bouve College of Health Sciences, Boston Medical Center, the Boston Public Health Commission and fifteen community health centers in the City. Established in 1991, CCHERS is a highly successful, nationally recognized model of community-based primary care education for medical, nursing, pharmacy and other health professions students through a network of "academic community health centers" engaged in a variety of health services and practice-based research designed to address the unique problems of urban underserved populations. The CCHERS partnership is the founder and oversees the Health Careers Academy (HCa), a public charter high school that provides pathways for urban and minority students to enter the health professions.

Prior to his position at CCHERS, Mr. Freeman served as the Executive Director/CEO of the Whittier Street Health Center for seventeen years. During his tenure the Center experienced tremendous growth, became federally funded and opened two satellite facilities. Mr. Freeman has also been the Assistant Director of the Mattapan Community Health Center and a Planner/Analyst at the Health Planning Council for Greater Boston, giving him a strong background in health care planning and administration. Mr. Freeman is an Adjunct Professor at Northeastern University Bouve College of Health Sciences School of Nursing where he teaches courses in health policy, community health, planning and administration. He also consults to a variety of health and human service agencies locally and nationally.

Mr. Freeman also serves on a number of boards and participates in a variety of organizations, including Community-Campus Partnerships for Health (past board chair), Massachusetts Health Policy Forum (founding member), South Africa Health Task Force, and Boston Medical Center. He has also been the recipient of a number of honors and awards. Mr. Freeman received his bachelor's degree in Health Services Administration from Northeastern University and his master's degree in Social Work from Boston College. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Law, Policy and Society Program at Northeastern University.

Sherril B. Gelmon, Senior Consultant

Sherril B. Gelmon, DrPH, is Professor of Public Health in the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University. She is the Coordinator of two masters degree programs in health administration and policy, as well as a faculty member in the doctoral program. She has over 20 years of experience in applied program evaluation, with two areas of particular expertise: community health program assessment and improvement, and design and implementation of models of assessment of community-based learning.

Sherril has worked extensively with CCPH, having directed the evaluation for the Health Professions Schools in Service to the Nation (HPSISN) program, the national demonstration of service-learning in the health professions that led to the organization's founding. She has co-authored several CCPH publications, including the final evaluation report for the HPSISN program and "Methods and Strategies for Assessing Service-Learning in the Health Professions."

As a CCPH senior consultant, she currently serves as the national evaluator for the Community Engaged Scholarship for Health Collaborative coordinated by CCPH with funding from the Fund Improvement of Postsecondary Education in the US Department of Education. She is also a member of the CCPH consultancy network.

Sherril has built much of her scholarship on work related to the scholarship of teaching and the scholarship of engagement. She was one of the first faculty tenured and promoted to full professor at Portland State University under the new guidelines which embrace a broad vision of scholarship. As a result, she has become increasingly interested in how faculty shape their scholarship with respect to community engagement, and has been studying, writing and presenting on this topic since 2001.

She presents frequently and is widely published on multiple topics related to evaluation, assessment, accreditation, and community health improvement. In 2005 she was presented with the Distinguished Researcher award by the International Service-Learning Research Conference, as well as being awarded the Oregon Masters of Public Health Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Sherril is an alumna of the Pew Health Policy Fellows Program, and received her doctorate in health policy from the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan, her masters in health administration from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto, and undergraduate degrees in physical therapy from the Universities of Toronto and Saskatchewan. She is a Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives.

Piper K. McGinley, Senior Consultant

Piper K. McGinley, MA is the former associate director of CCPH and currently serves as a senior consultant for CCPH. Piper directed the CCPH headquarters housed at UCSF Center for the Health Professions, and was responsible for the content and planning of CCPH's annual conference, the introductory and advanced service-learning institutes, and served as lead staff on numerous other projects, including several California-focused initiatives. In addition, Piper produced the bi-annual CCPH magazine, Partnership Perspectives. After CCPH relocated its operations to the University of Washington, Piper served as the Associate Director of the Integrated Nurse Leadership Program (INLP), housed at UCSF Center for the Health Professions. INLP is a Betty and Gordon Moore Foundation program that brings together nurses and hospital executives from the San Francisco Bay Area to learn skills in leadership and management and to implement quality and safety initiatives in their hospitals.

In addition to her role as a senior consultant for CCPH, Piper is currently the Associate Director for California Campus Compact. Piper holds an undergraduate degree in Peace and Conflict Resolution from UC Berkeley, and a Master of Arts degree in International Peace and Conflict Resolution from The American University.

Nancy Shore, Senior Consultant

Nancy Shore, PhD is an Assistant Professor at the University of New England's School of Social Work in Portland, Maine. Her primary teaching areas include research, community practice, and ethical issues. Nancy strives to create opportunities for students to collaborate with different community groups as part of their coursework. At times this entails working with agencies to develop and implement evaluation strategies, to co-organizing community events to raise awareness. Nancy also has served on various ethics review committees and has conducted several studies related to the institutional review board (IRB) process and the promotion of ethical research. In Maine she served as a board member of a peer support and recovery center, as well as a grassroots organization aimed at empowering Latino women and their families.

In 2003 Nancy worked with CCPH on a NIH funded project to identify the infrastructure required to support and sustain community-university partnerships. She returned to CCPH in 2007 as a senior consultant, working primarily on projects related to community-based research and ethical considerations.

Nancy received both her MSW and MPH at the University of Washington, with a focus on Maternal and Child Health. After four years working at Neighborhood House Head Start, she returned to the University to complete her doctoral degree in Social Welfare.

Rachel Vaughn, Senior Consultant

Rachel is a Senior Consultant with Community-Campus Partnerships for Health. Rachel has organized the CCPH Service-Learning Institute since 2005, and has served as a mentor for the Institute since 2003. Rachel also works with CCPH to coordinate the CCPH Consultancy Network, and to share service-learning resources for CCPH members. In addition to her work with CCPH, Rachel serves as the Associate Director of the Carlson Leadership & Public Service Center at the University of Washington. In her role at the Carlson Center, Rachel directs the service-learning program and works closely with faculty to assist them in integrating service-learning into their course syllabi, assignments, and academic research. In addition, Rachel works with the neighboring University District to develop quality service-learning experiences to meet the needs of community partners, clients, UW students, and faculty.

Prior to working at the Carlson Center, Rachel worked full time as a Program Director with Community-Campus Partnerships for Health. In this role, Rachel coordinated the CCPH Consultancy Network, the CCPH Fellows Program, Partners in Caring and Community: Service-Learning in Nursing Education, and other CCPH capacity building activities involving campuses and communities.

Rachel received her Bachelor of Science degree in Environmental Education from Huxley College of Environmental Studies at Western Washington University. While at Western, Rachel began her career in the field of service-learning by developing and implementing three campus based service programs. Rachel earned her Masters of Social Work degree at the University of Washington, and spent some time as an academic advisor for the Program on the Environment at UW.