|
HOME | SEARCH | CONTACT US |
|||||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
KBFPC STAFF
STAFF BIOS
Michelle Waneka, Director: From auspicious beginnings as an occasional but dedicated volunteer to the present all-consuming responsibilities of executive directorship, the adventure continues to be oh-so rewarding. I love and believe in what the Clinic stands for: personal responsibility, active participation in one's own health, empowerment of the individual, shared experiences, and the autonomy, worth, and the freedom of choice for each of us - whether client, or staff or board member. My job is to promote well-being - what begins in a smaller circle expands to the greater whole - and why not? Our community deserves the best of what a grass-roots reproductive care clinic can be--unique and vibrant, striving for excellence, and committed to offering our best to each person who walks through our doors. Sooo....I hope to continue creating just that.
Julie McCarron, CNM-Practitioner: As a certified Nurse-Midwife/Advanced Nurse Practitioner I care for women across the lifespan and young children in my jobs at KBFPC and Homer Medical Clinic. I have been here at KBFPC since fall of 2004. I can’t think of a better place to work and grow as a practitioner and for women to come for women’s health care. It is such a positive place to work and I hope we make it a positive place for women to get their care too. I enjoy helping women make good health decisions to achieve their best state of health in all aspects of their lives. I am also the parent of 5 children ranging in age from 18 to 6. In addition to spending time with my husband and kids I enjoy hiking and camping, watching my kids sports games, reading and walking and skiing.
Sonja Martin-Young, CNM-Practitioner: I am a certified nurse-midwife. I split my time between doing well-woman visits at KBFPC and full scope midwifery at Homer Medical Clinic. I started practicing at KBFPC in spring 2002 and really enjoy working here. I have a passion for helping women achieve their optimal health. I value the opportunity to empower clients in making reproductive health choices that work for them. When I am not being a midwife, I spend time with family, my dogs and horses and enjoy reading, hiking and skiing. I am very happy to be part of the Homer community.
Catriona Lowe, Clinic Manager: I’ve been working at the Clinic since January 2003, and the time has flown by. All of the Staff wear many hats: I love the variety of mine, and the way they fit. From case management to HIV counseling, billing, client intake, who knows what I’ll be working on at any given time? My favorite aspect of working here is empowering clients to make well informed choices about their health care. Before KBFPC, I was lucky enough to work at several other Homer area non-profits, including the Pratt Museum and Kachemak Heritage Land Trust. I am the parent of two young boys, and enjoy playing and learning with them. I’ve been a board member for KBBI, Homer’s public radio station, since January 2006. Somewhere in there I also squeeze in broomball, snowboarding, food, reading and knitting.
Shay Hoffman, Clinic Assistant: My illustrious career with KBFPC began in 2000, when, fresh off the boat from California I wandered by the little house on Main street in search of good deeds to do. From coaching Latina teenagers through their pregnancy and birth to working in a sperm bank, I’ve been drawn to the field of women and health for some time. As volunteer, board member and now bonafide clinic assistant, I’ve felt fortunate to be involved with an agency that provides such accessible, high quality care to the community. Maybe some day all these years of school will add up to some initials after my name, but for now, on days off, I might be found pulling weeds, stringing beads or trying to learn a thing or two from my 6 year old son.
Joseph Lapp II, Clinic Assistant: I was born and raised in a small, leafy New Jersey suburb, the only boy in a house of women. After high school graduation I spent two years studying theology before swearing off formal education. I spent a year living in Camden, NJ (then the most dangerous city in the country) and became active in anti-gentrification, anti-racist struggles. After leaving Camden, I traveled the country for a while, visiting each of the lower 48, and nearly every major city. Upon returning east, I moved to Philadelphia and joined with the Industrial Workers of the World in labor and community organizing around a variety of working class issues. Very soon after moving to Homer in spring of 2006, I walked into the Clinic and immediately decided that this was the place I wanted to be. That goal took a year to become reality, but I was finally hired. I've always maintained a staunch feminist ethic and feel that working at KBFPC involves me in an important and vital struggle, as well as providing me with a really fun, vibrant place to work.
MaryClare Foecke, Health Educator: I came to Alaska in 1992 for the summer, and forgot to return - to my beloved Seattle where I'd spent 5 years teaching at an adolescent day treatment program and working with street kids at a drop-in center, to the Bay Area where I'd attended college surrounded by much more yuppie-ness than I knew what to do with, and to Paris, where everybody should be as lucky to spend their childhood and adolescence as I was. Even if the academics are grueling, at least they treat you like human beings and not just risk factors. And oh, the cafes... I still fit in rather poorly here in the U.S., tending to question all things "normal." I'm chagrined by oppression, repression, suppression - so much of the air we breathe. But I'm drawn to the quirkiness of Homer, am inspired by the work I get to do here, dig my colleagues, and love teen-agers. What more could a girl want? A paper-route and a fleet of Subarus? Got those too. Love it.
Chris Fontaine, Outreach Coordinator: I have been lucky to be part of the team, working some in the Clinic and mostly with Women’s Health Outreach, since 2003. Coming from a background in women’s health advocacy in domestic violence and sexual assault, I see our unique one-to-one outreach to the women as a positive and powerful way to bring our community together. I am having a blast with my two year old son, and get outside to play and hike as much as I can. I am on staff in Acute Care at the hospital as a CNA, and am working towards nursing school in the near future. Cross country skiing, ski-joring, cultural anthropology, music, and spending time with people I love top my list of favorites! Marla McPherson, Outreach: I joined KBFPC’s outreach staff in 2006, after ten years working in outreach and development with other local nonprofit organizations including the Pratt Museum, Cook Inletkeeper, and Kachemak Heritage Land Trust. My work at KBFPC is a perfect compliment to my passion for community action and social change. I believe that health care is a fundamental human right, and I am proud to be part of a clinic that makes quality reproductive health care more accessible. I love living in Alaska, where I can pursue all the activities that make my life richer -- backpacking, cross country skiing, natural history, homesteading, dancing, music, and coaching the high school debate team. "ALTERNATIVE" STAFF BIOS
Michelle Waneka Michelle recently left a long-time career in crab fishing, after becoming famous on the TV series Deadliest Catch. Michelle is best known as the fearless captain leading an all women crew on the F/V Guinness, and is revered for her unwavering leadership in the high seas of the Bering Sea. The new-found fame on Deadliest Catch was not a natural fit for this modest women, so Michelle reluctantly left her long-loved career in commercial crab fishing and moved to Homer to create a new life for herself. The KBFPC board quickly snatched her up, knowing that her experience as a crab boat captain would be a perfect fit for Director of the Family Planning Clinic.
Julie McCarron Julie joined KBFPC after completing her Ph.D. in biomedical research at the University of Rochester Medical Center. At Rochester Medical Center, Julie interned for William Bonnez, M.D. in research that helped lead to the invention of the HPV vaccine, which now prevents a type of cancer that affected 225,000 women worldwide each year. Julie also homeschools her five children, and serves on the President’s Council for Women’s Health, where she helped found womenshealth.gov.
Sonja Martin-Young Sonja grew up in the San Diego Zoo, where her mother was a zookeeper that specialized in primates. Sonja traveled with her mother throughout the world to study primates in the wild, and it was during her childhood in the Republic of Congo where Sonja discovered her passion working with people. Sonja and her mother lived with family friends who ran a health clinic in Kinshasa. When Sonja’s mother would go to the mountains to study gorillas, Sonja stayed behind to help at the clinic. At age 13, Sonja helped deliver her first baby, which lead to her career in OBGYN and midwifery. When you come in to see Sonja, please bring a 16 oz skinny Alaska Chai and wear purple underwear.
Catriona Lowe Catriona hails from the United Kingdom. After completing her MBA at Oxford, Catriona was recruited by one of the ground breaking dot com firms in Silicon Valley. It was here that she founded several of her own dot com businesses, but after having her first child, realized that she wanted a simpler life without the high stress that the corporate world embodied. During her second pregnancy, she knew she needed a change, and so she sold her businesses and moved to Alaska, just a year short of the dot com crash. In Alaska, she opened a bakery and a small snowboard school for kids. The family planning clinic recognized her unique combination of people and business management skills, and snatched her up to join the KBFPC team as Clinic Manager.
Shay Hoffman Shay grew up on a farm near Austin, Texas, where she would escape after a hard-days work to indulge in the cowboy poetry and country music scene in this famous music-capital. Her poetry and song-writing talents were recognized by her high school teacher, who introduced her to Bonnie Rait’s manager in 1990. Shay wrote several hit songs performed by famous female singers such as Bonnie Rait, Kathy Mattea, and Allison Krausse. Her career as a song-writer for such influential female artists made Shay uniquely aware of the strengths, hopes and desires of women. She began volunteering with women’s health clinics, primarily serving the immigrant Latino population in the inner city. It was here that she found a new passion for working with women and families in public health. She completed a nursing degree and while working as a traveling nurse, she landed in Homer. She fell in love with this beautiful place, and with KBFPC.
Joseph Lapp II After traveling around the country for seven years, promoting his family's line of t-shirts, Joseph reached the end of the road in Homer and discovered his new home at the family planning clinic. Joseph was raised in one of the oldest t-shirt shops in New Jersey. When the rest of Americans were still wearing t-shirts as underwear, the Lapp family was launching t-shirt fashion into the new socially oriented artistic experimentation of the 1930s. The crack down on communism in the U.S. temporarily laid to rest the use of t-shirts as a tool for political and artistic expression. But in the early 1990s, young Joseph traveled to the cotton fields and sweatshops in Central America, where he discovered extreme poverty and human rights abuses caused by the American clothing industry. Upon returning to the U.S., Joseph organized his family in a remake of the t-shirt shop, and formed Revolt-Ts, a cutting edge part of the ecofashion revolution, working with farmers, labor unions, artists and political activitists to develop socially and environmentally-conscious t-shirts whose primary purpose was once again social change. Joseph now incorporates his expertise to further the outreach of the clinic in bringing men and women together to ensure social change and community health in Homer.
MaryClare Foecke Mary Clare discovered her natural abilities working with people when she ran her first paper route at age 9. Atop her purple BMX bike, Mary Clare connected with people young and old as she came into their lives each day to deliver the news. In 1985, she became a missionary for the Pentecostal Catholic Church of Christ. This work took her around the world, where she witnessed a deep desire among women for access to reproductive health care and birth control. During a mission in Paris, France, she volunteered with a clinic where she discovered her talent working with youth. She returned to the U.S. to work with KBFPC in reproductive health care education. And she still delivers papers to this day, but has upgraded from her BMX bike to a fleet of Subarus, with a recent addition of one stylin’ Toyota pickup.
Chris Fontaine Chris Fontaine’s journey to Alaska started in Chicago, where she worked as a fashion model for the magazine industry. She quickly discovered the dark side of the model industry, and how it drove women to starvation, depression, and self-hatred. She stuck with it long enough to fund her college education, where she was completing a degree in journalism from the University of Chicago and published a shocking expose on the dangers of the modeling industry on women’s health. Her story was picked up by Ms. Magazine, and she became a regular contributor to Ms. Magazine on issues of women’s health and empowerment. In 1994, Chris traveled to Alaska to complete research and write a piece on the innovative work of the clinic in reaching out to medically underserved women. She fell in love with Homer and the clinic and returned to lead-up one of the most unique women’s health outreach programs in the nation.
Marla McPherson Marla was raised on a sheep ranch in rural Colorado. At a young age, she followed a handsome Argentina sheep-herder to South America, where she traveled with a band of gypsies, learning tango, Spanish guitar, and the fine art of Les Trapézistes. In 1995, Marla began her career as a trapeze artist in the Circ Mundial de Buena Aires. When she wasn’t performing, she volunteered with rural development projects to preserve the sustainable agricultural lifestyles and practices of rural indigenous farmers. When Marla and her handsome sheep-herder returned to the U.S., she landed in Homer and in the outreach position at KBFPC, where she applies her background in entertainment and community development by going door-to-door, making reproductive health care more accessible to women.
|
|||
|
3959 Ben Walters Lane, Homer, Alaska 99603 ? Phone: 907.235.3436 ? Fax: 907.235.8346
About Us
|
Services
|
News & Events|
Get Involved
|
Resources
A United Way Member Agency |
|||||
