‘Personal mission’ accomplished: Longtime Spokane health district employee and equity specialist leaving for new job

Heleen Dewey was already part of the team working to incorporate equity into the Spokane Regional Health District’s structure and work when the pandemic hit.

It’s been a year and a half since Dewey has been operating on what she calls the “pilot light” that stays lit by her passion for public health, which has kept her going.

After 20 years at the health district, Dewey will leave the agency in July for a new position as the equity and social justice manager in the Washington Department of Health’s emergency preparedness division. She will still be based in Spokane.

Her desire to do public health work began where she grew up.

Dewey, an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians who is also Santee Sioux, found her calling for public health growing up on the Fort Peck Assiniboine Sioux Reservation in Wolf Point, Montana.

Witnessing family members, friends and neighbors struggle with preventable chronic illnesses,she learned it takes more than education to address the environmental conditions that impact public health.

When the pandemic hit, that work got even more personal.

“During the pandemic, I had family on the reservation really impacted and people (were) dying; it became a personal mission,” she said.

Dewey started at the district in 2001 as an administrative assistant, while she was completing her program at Eastern Washington University in community health. She worked on several programs in the district, including the active living program, the walking school bus program and other transportation initiatives.

A few months into the pandemic, she took on a new job and formal role as the district’s equity officer in April 2020.

The district followed King County’s model in its emergency preparedness planning, with an equity officer reporting directly to the incident commander.

Dewey got to work. She and her team convened the COVID equity task force, a biweekly (and sometimes weekly) forum to communicate with community organizations and groups about what they needed, including masks, testing access and translated information.

This way, Dewey could take feedback, as brutal or honest as it was, directly back to health district leaders and help inform the district’s response.

Dewey began working on equity inside the health district’s walls under the previous Administrator, Torney Smith. The district contracted with Human Impact Partners to work on equity planning with the executive leadership team, which continues.

“That will be huge, because it’s really, I feel to advance equity anywhere as professionals and people, we have to start a journey to understand and self-reflect on ourselves and our own biases and understand where we benefit and have privilege,” she said.

The data team at the Spokane Regional Health District is where the equity work showed up first during the pandemic. They found that Pacific Islanders were disproportionately impacted by the virus in the county, particularly the Marshallese community.

If the race and ethnicity data had not been disaggregated to include Pacific Islanders in their own category, the impact the virus had on the Marshallese community might have been missed.

“It’s hard to lead with an equity lens when we need to have a better understanding about the unique needs of communities,” Dewey said.

At the end of July 2020, in the midst of nationwide protests over police brutality against Black people and the second wave of the pandemic, the Spokane Board of Health adopted an equity resolution.

It crystallized a lot of Dewey’s past work, formalizing the internal equity work the health district needs to do and calling for community partnerships. It also calls for diversity and inclusion in hiring.

“Spokane Regional Health District will apply strategies for recruiting and hiring a workforce that reflects the demographic, cultural, and linguistic characteristics of the populations it serves,” the resolution states.

There is still much more to get done.

Dewey worked on the internal civil rights plan, which is in the process of being updated to address community engagement and key lessons from the pandemic year.

She is confident the work will continue even as she departs, but she is also leaving right as years of her work is paying off.

“I’m excited, and that’s the hardest thing for me, is making that decision to leave at this opportune time when we will transform,” she said.

She added that she is entirely replaceable, and the district will re-hire for the equity officer position.

“We have some amazing people here,” she said. “This is also their passion; I know it will continue.”

Dewey is also confident in the team she’s leaving behind and hopes they can be cared for after a year-and-a-half of emergency response.

“We have to build more trust; every system has to build more trust,” Dewey said. “How we do that authentically is going to be important.”

This story has been updated to reflect the correct reservation she grew up on, which is the Fort Peck Assiniboine Sioux Reservation in Wolf Point, Montana.