Maya Chilese

Introducing our next spotlight, Maya Chilese! Like many of us, she has no sense of time after the last year so she thinks its been 3 years since she has been involved with the MPHTC! Currently, she is preparing for their reaccreditation application so every day is “chaos”. She is consumed with digging in to the details of the national public health standards and measures, identifying examples of meeting those, and keeping track of opportunities to improve. What does she think is the value of MPHTC? Maya believes it is “vital for all professionals to have groups of peers that provide support, share resources, promote accountability, pilot efforts and align common goals for greater impact”. The MPHTC offers a coordinated venue for this and allows for a safe space for public health partners to take collective action, which is what we love to do! Like many others, she wishes colleagues knew that MPHTC exists. There is never one office within a health department that is alone, coming up with ideas; a network of experts exists to support our regional public health infrastructure.

Her biggest dream for public health? Maya wishes every public health department was adequately funded with state and federal dollars to effectively address current and future public health issues, and that there was a breadth of diverse full-time employees with expertise across all 10 Essential Services. She wishes they had a reasonably sized training budget to ensure equitable access to all employees. She also wishes that the state department was independent and not under the executive branch so that “public health could actually DO public health, focusing on social determinants of health and aggressively tackling key issues without political recourse”. Maya wishes for a lot more but she thinks “this is a good start”.

Thank you, Maya!