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The Strategic Planning Committee has outlined the following strategy for the immediate future. This strategy serves a mission of narrowing the health care disparity gap for minorities in Cleveland, with a focus on doing so by increasing the pool of minority physicians and dentists.
The Committee reasoned the "Pool" could be increased by attention to Health Legacy's principal function heretofore, i.e. that of providing scholarships, but also by: (1) efforts to recruit or steer minority youth into the health professions and (2) by enhancing practice opportunities for physicians and dentists who would like to practice in the Cleveland area, particularly the recipients of our scholarships.
Scholarship strategy: Increasing our scholarship award level, with the rationale that an upward adjustment would give the awards more impact, and thereby inspire the recipients to more seriously consider returning to Cleveland for practice. Increasing the size of the award would mean decreasing the number of awards and this has to be weighed against the increase.
Tracking recipients of scholarships. Knowledge gained would reveal how successful our strategy of increasing the professional pool in Cleveland has been and whether, indeed, how effective our scholarship enticement is. Such a database would also provide a source of future benefit to Health Legacy through donations and information that could be public relations benefit.
Practice Opportunity: Since even the best intentioned scholarship recipients might find the eventual establishing of a practice in Cleveland difficult, the Board might do well to consider the developing a support strategy which would foster these individuals being invited into and assimilated into the Cleveland health professional community. This could come about via alignment with institutions and individuals in a position to offer positions to alumni of our scholarship awards. With this in mind, new membership to our board should include such key individuals and representatives of such key institutions.
To make sure our scholarship recipients get the most out of what Health Legacy has to offer them in establishing their careers in Cleveland, a regular communication of these intentions should be made and such counseling should be made in a palatable manner.
Recruitment of youth: Working with pre-college youth to acquaint them with medicine and dentistry and perhaps inspire and/or facilitate their entry into these professions. Certain programs of this sort are in place today or planned for the near future. Rather than undertake a program of its own, Health Legacy might wish to broker the enhancement of these programs, according to their expressed needs.
Volunteerism: Health Legacy's limited staff (Executive Director only) calls for board members to include a certain amount of volunteering among their responsibilities. Volunteering serves a strategic purpose, i.e. the accomplishment of certain organizational goals by dint of personal stature and/or influence, or it could serve an immediate, tactical purpose, as in evaluating a lease for a prospective office site. The force we can bring to bear on an item, the more successful we will be.
Leon Brown, MD
President and Chairman of the Board
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