Moving Toward Community Health: An Evening with Morgan McDonald

Limited tickets for South Cumberland Community Fund's fall fundraiser, "Moving Toward Health: An Evening with Morgan McDonald," remain and are only available through September 20! This year's event will be held at Cravens Hall in Sewanee, with cocktails at 5:30 pm and dinner following at 6:30. Secure your seat here. Learn more about our speaker, Morgan McDonald, in Executive Director Tom Sanders's "Notes from the Field" story below.

Bonnie Miller and Morgan McDonald

Consensus, Compassion, and Planning Align to Point the Way

Last week, Bonnie Miller and I met with Morgan McDonald, who will be our featured speaker at the Fall Fundraiser, “Moving Toward Community Health: An Evening with Morgan McDonald.” Bonnie co-leads our community health working group with Jim Peterman. Sitting with Morgan and Bonnie at Casa Fiesta on Bell Road in Nashville, I realized I was talking to two very thoughtful people who are absolutely dedicated to building healthier societies and who have done impactful work in medical education, policy making, and medical practice.

“I have had lots of students who have wanted to go into medicine motivated by the desire to help others,” said Miller, “but Morgan was the first person I taught who put it so succinctly that she wanted to practice poverty medicine.” 

After completing medical school, McDonald did a primary care residency in medicine-pediatrics at the University of North Carolina that offered experience in providing care to economically vulnerable patients. “At the time, Vanderbilt did not have opportunities for doctors to complete their training in a setting like that, and Chapel Hill was a really good place for that kind of residency,” she said.

Soon, though, McDonald was back in Tennessee, encouraged to return to Vanderbilt by Miller to help build programs that support more community based clinical rotations in Nashville. “Morgan was one of our faculty members who developed new curricula in community medicine for Vanderbilt,” Miller says. McDonald did this work for just over seven years before joining the Tennessee Department of Health as deputy medical director for family health and wellness. In short order, she moved up in the department to assistant commissioner for health policy, then deputy commissioner, and finally interim commissioner of health. McDonald is now national director of population health for Milbank Memorial Foundation and directs an educational program for public health leaders at the state level all across the country. 

A central focus  of her work with the Tennessee Department of Health was designing grant programs to improve public health across the state, particularly in rural areas. One such program is the Rural Health Resilience program, through which SCCF has just received a transformative grant.

“Our first round of resiliency grants came out of COVID relief money,” she said. “Those experiences led us to really start to focus on what makes communities more resilient.” 

“You know, medicine in the 20th century has really made some remarkable advances,” added Miller, “but what we have increasingly learned is that you can’t treat your way to public health.” 

“Exactly,” said McDonald. “If you are in a clinical setting, you start to see the same people and the same problems, and it’s important to look upstream. Access to medical care is very important, but even more important is to know what you can do to keep people out of the need for medical intervention.” 

To look specifically at outcomes for rural communities, Morgan led the formation of a rural healthcare task force. “We gathered stakeholders from around the state and tried to answer that basic question of what practical steps we could take to make rural places healthier and more resilient,” she said.

That work yielded a task force report that became the official guiding document for the current Rural Health Resilience grant program, which yielded a grant of $2.1 million for South Cumberland Community Fund. “We weren’t able to get everything we wanted into the report. Some suggested steps were political nonstarters, but we were able to put a great deal into the grant program.”

South Cumberland Community Fund is fortunate that we have been selected as a grant recipient in the Rural Health Resilience program. We are hard at work creating a health mobility network for the Plateau, which includes both rides for people as well as accompaniment on people’s health journeys by a corps of community health workers. 

At the Fall Fundraiser, we’ll be celebrating the partnership we’ve created with five area nonprofits, and we are thrilled that the architect of that program will be with us to help us celebrate as a community a movement toward health and resilience for all. 

If you have not already purchased a seat at the table, we certainly hope you will consider it. Prepare to be inspired by visionary leadership.

-Tom Sanders, Executive Director

Event Sponsor

Tower Community Bank

Patrons

Jan and Joe DeLozier

Sheri and Mark Lawrence

Doug Ferris and Dot Neale

Ruth Patterson and Rich Wyckoff

Table Hosts

Nancy and Rhea Bowden

Laurie and Jay Fisher

Tan and John Hille

Martha and Eddie Krenson

Lee and Tom Limbird

Marguerite Lloyd

Lodge Manufacturing

Bonnie and John McCardell

Phoebe and Rob Pearigen

Merissa Tobler and Jim Peterman

Sydney and David Shipps

Carol and Bill Titus

Margaret Woods

Get your tickets today at this link.