MeHAF Funds Scholarships for Emerging Health Leaders

MeHAF will provide scholarship funding to Maine's statewide Health Leadership Development program over the next three years to support greater collaboration among future leaders across the state. Given its mission to ensure that all people in Maine have access to quality health care, MeHAF seeks to encourage greater participation from health professionals working in smaller nonprofit organizations that serve the foundation's target population. This new scholarship support for the eight-month development course is directed toward emerging leaders who represent or work directly with people who are uninsured or underserved.

"By providing scholarship support, MeHAF can help our best and brightest minds focus on solutions that offer better options for improved health and better health care for all Maine people," said Dr. Wendy J. Wolf, President and CEO of MeHAF. "In this current economy, many nonprofit health care organizations don't have the financial resources to allow their executives to participate in leadership training programs, yet their voices and perspectives are crucial to leading Maine forward with better solutions to improving health and health care."

Maine's Health Leadership Development program was established in 2006 as a partnership between the Daniel Hanley Center for Health Leadership and the Institute for Civic Leadership. Each year the Health Leadership Development program selects about 30 experienced leaders from across the professional spectrum with an interest in health policy and service delivery including providers, clinicians, insurance professionals, educators, administrators, public health professionals and government officials.

To date the program has graduated more than sixty leaders who can help guide Maine people and institutions through the increasingly complex health care environment and budding reform efforts. These leaders bring vision, knowledge and skills to the challenge of building and maintaining a strong and effective health coverage system now and in the future. Participants learn to work collaboratively, to facilitate productively, to use analysis and evidence-based tools, and to better understand cultural diversity in order to catalyze and maintain progress.

The Daniel Hanley Center for Health Leadership was established in 2002 to carry on the legacy of the late Dr. Daniel F. Hanley, who was one of Maine's most well known physician leaders. Dr. Hanley was the physician at Bowdoin College for more than three decades and headed the Maine Medical Association for a quarter century. He was instrumental in the establishment of the Maine Health Information Center , the Maine Medical Assessment Foundation and other groups focused on improving quality. He was a pioneer in the field of sports medicine and served as chief physician to the U.S. Olympic Committee for many years, where he led efforts to build a drug testing program.

For more than 15 years, the Portland-based Institute for Civic Leadership has been developing leaders through its 15-day leadership intensive program, which pulls together leaders from private industry, nonprofits and the public sector. More than 400 individuals have completed the ILC intensive course.

The third statewide Health Leadership Development class began this month in Hallowell.