Governance board members

Dr. Helen Bellanca is a family physician who has been practicing in Oregon since completing her residency at Oregon Health & Science University in 1999. For most of that time, she has worked as a primary care physician in Federally Qualified Health Centers, serving primarily uninsured Oregonians and those on Medicaid. She was honored as Oregon’s Rural Health Practitioner of the Year in 2004. She currently provides clinical care through Northwest Permanente.

After completing a master’s degree in public health and a Robert Wood Johnson Fellowship, Helen became engaged in health policy and advocacy, first with the Oregon Public Health Institute, where she worked on the prevention of childhood obesity. She then was medical director for the Oregon Foundation of Reproductive Health, where she was the co-creator of the One Key Question initiative promoting pregnancy intention screening in primary care.

When the coordinated care organization model was created, she joined Health Share of Oregon and served as its associate medical director. Her focus there was integration of behavioral health services and physical health care, and she collaborated with partners to create Project Nurture, which integrates substance-use treatment and maternity care for pregnant and postpartum women. The success of that program led to statewide expansion as Nurture Oregon.

Helen has valuable experience working with complex systems and alternative payment strategies to help communities get the care they need, and she is committed to working for universal health care with a single-payer strategy.

Term ends: January 2027

Dr. Judy Richardson is a family physician and the academic program director in the Division of Management at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). She has practiced medicine in Oregon for the past 20 years and was active with the implementation of the Columbia Gorge Health Council and Clinical Advisory Panel. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she helped support the Oregon Health Authority as the deputy director for clinics and health centers in its COVID Recovery and Response Unit. She became involved with the economic evaluation of Medicaid through her role as a project manager in the evaluation of the Washington Medicaid Transformation Project at the Center for Health Systems Effectiveness at OHSU. She currently works full time in the Division of Management where she teaches courses in health systems, business strategy, and health economics.

Term ends: January 2029

Amy Fellows is a lifelong Oregonian living in Eugene. Amy has a master’s degree in public health and has spent much of her career working with safety net clinics supporting health information technology efforts. Amy has led We Can Do Better, a small health care civic engagement organization, since 2013. She has hosted civic engagement events focused on health equity and systems change and was instrumental in bringing OpenNotes to Oregon, which has allowed greater transparency for patients. Amy is passionate about disability justice and addressing systemic ableism and racism so all Oregonians can live their best lives.

Term ends: January 2027

Cherryl Ramirez has served as executive director of the Association of Oregon Community Mental Health Programs (AOCMHP) for 12 years. The association represents community mental health programs that manage and provide services for people with mental health and substance-use disorders and community developmental disabilities programs that provide case management services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

The association also provides a wide array of trainings in the areas of mental health promotion and clinical services, suicide prevention and post-suicide intervention, and mobile crisis services, and it houses the Alliance to Prevent Suicide. Cherryl advocates for policies and resources to support and improve the community behavioral health and developmental disabilities systems in collaboration with behavioral health associations, human service advocacy organizations, and other system partners.

Cherryl served four years as president of the National Association of County Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities Directors Board and four years as its past president. She also represented the public behavioral health system on the Joint Task Force on Universal Health Care. Before her position with AOCMHP, Cherryl served as the executive director of the Association of Community Mental Health Authorities of Illinois for eight years.

Term ends: January 2028

Michelle Glass is the policy and advocacy coordinator at the Regional Health Equity Coalition of Southern Oregon. She is a community organizer with two decades of community engagement and grassroots policy experience at the local and state levels. Her experience includes working and volunteering with community-based organizations, chairing her local planning commission, serving on statewide rulemaking advisory committees, and participating in Oregon Health Authority advisory committees related to health and health care.

Michelle’s passion for expanding health care access to all Oregonians comes from lived experience with chronic health conditions and health care access barriers, as well as from years of working directly with communities experiencing these barriers. She is proud of the innovation and determination that Oregon is known for and believes our state can and must continue expanding access to affordable, high-quality health care as a key part of achieving health equity for all Oregonians.

Term ends: January 2026

Mary Lou Hennrich holds a master's degree in nursing and community health from the University of Portland. Born in Oregon, Mary Lou has served Oregonians in a career of public health and health care advocacy for more than 50 years. She began as a public health nurse for the Multnomah County Health Department. She rose through a variety of leadership positions, including managing or creating programs related to maternal-child health, health promotion, and community-based primary care. In 1985, Mary Lou implemented Oregon’s first school-based health clinic at Portland’s Roosevelt High School. She was the founding chief executive officer of CareOregon (1994-2003) and then served as director of the Oregon Public Health Institute. At the institute, she led work that resulted in laws establishing nutrition standards for foods and beverages sold in public schools in addition to state and national restaurant menu labeling laws. Mary Lou chaired the Oregon Coalition of Local Public Health Officials and has received lifetime achievement awards from the Oregon Public Health Association and the Oregon Health Forum. A proud 50-plus-year member of the Oregon Nurses Association, she has spent her career fighting for justice and equity in health care. She founded the Billi Odegaard Scholarship Fund to provide nursing scholarships to achieve diversity in nursing—excellence in care. In her spare time she enjoys cooking, traveling, camping and spending time with her grandchildren.

Term ends: January 2026

Bruce Goldberg, M.D., is a professor at the Oregon Health & Science University-Portland State University School of Public Health and a nationally recognized health policy expert.

Over the past four decades, Bruce’s career has spanned leadership roles across a number of health care organizations in the public and private sector. He served two Oregon governors as the director of the Oregon Office for Health Policy and Research and the director of the Oregon Department of Human Services. He was also the founding director of the Oregon Health Authority.

Bruce and his team led Oregon’s nationally recognized health reforms, helping to transform Oregon’s Medicaid system to one based on a model of coordinated care. In addition, he established Oregon’s Healthy Kids program, which provided health coverage for all children and transformed the delivery of public human services to enhance efficiency and effectiveness. He recently chaired the Oregon Legislature’s Joint Task Force on Universal Health Care. His experiences include being the administrator of large complex organizations, a practicing clinician, a teacher/academician, a county health officer, the medical director for a Medicaid managed care organization, and the clinical director for U.S. Public Health Services in Zuni, New Mexico.

Term ends: January 2028

Chunhuei Chi is a professor at the Oregon State University College of Health and affiliated with its Health Management and Policy Program and Global Health Program. He completed his master’s degree in international public health from the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston and holds a Doctor of Science in health policy and management from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His doctoral research was focused on health system finance, health insurance coverage, and access to health care.

Chunhuei has helped promote universal health care in Oregon and the United States. He testified three times before the Oregon Legislature to support universal health care in the state. He also contributed to establishing Taiwan’s universal health care system and continues to serve as a policy advisor and give workshops in Taiwan. He continues to research the universal health care systems of Chile, South Korea, and Taiwan. He published peer-reviewed papers focused on community ownership and health governance, equity in health, health care, and the financial burden of health care in Bangladesh, Chile, Ecuador, and Taiwan.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Chunhuei also developed expertise in international comparative pandemic control policies and was interviewed by U.S. and international media more than 400 times.

Term ends: January 2028

Founding executive director of OCHIN, Mike has a diverse background with more than four decades in health care planning, administration, and hospital leadership. He has been in key leadership positions with Kaiser Permanente in Oregon, where he served as Health Plan manager, and in northern California, where he was director of 15 Kaiser Permanente hospitals. He has been a Public Health director for both rural Tillamook and urban Alameda County. Mike has extensive global health experiences. He has been a consultant, speaker, and lecturer in more than a dozen countries, including Singapore, Australia, and Kenya. Mike served on various national, state, and county health boards, including the Oregon Health Council, which he chaired, the National Association of Public Hospitals, Secretary of California Hospital Association, the Oregon Primary Care Association, and Clackamas County Community Health. Mike has been teaching health courses to medical, nursing, and health administration students at University of California-Berkeley, University of Southern California, Linfield College, and Oregon Health and Science University, and looks forward to aiding the board’s efforts to move toward universal health and basic health access for all Oregonians.

Term ends: January 2029