Her succinct, profound view of leadership expresses an insight born from the difficult work of social change and reflection on it. Interviews with Reed and other Community Health Leader award winners identified a set of beliefs that shaped their perspectives, fueled their initiative, and fostered their creativity. Among those beliefs are that: 

• All people have intrinsic value worthy of investment. 
• Cultural diversity is strength. 
• People have the right to self-determination in their own communities. 
• Mutuality and interdependence are more important than individualism. 
• Participation in the governmental process is a responsibility of a healthy community. 
• Community education and employment are significant preventive health measures. 

On a day-to-day basis this form of leadership requires interpersonal elements of leadership: compassion; inspiration for individual, personal change; inspiration for group effort to move to unimagined places; and the delegation of credit for success. On the practical side, this leader-ship requires commitment to the long haul of change; commitment to the details of change efforts; and coping with conditions and people not ready to change. 

The success of community health leaders suggests that effective leadership for social change at the local and national level requires that people look to the antecedents of a problem. A symptom is not the illness. Alleviating symptoms is not a cure. So like a health professional, health leaders must search for root causes before they define a problem and then can work toward an effective remedy that deals with causes, not effects. Community, an increased sense of responsibility for one another including the provision of public programs with higher standards to address human needs, provides the most effective remedy for problems in health and related problems. Community is the antecedent of community health and both of them, like leadership, provide the "opportunity for others to give their gift."

— Richard A. Couto
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Richard A. Couto is currently writing, with Stephanie Eken, To Give Their Gifts: Leadership, Community, and Health Care, a book that profiles 12 RWJ Community Health Leaders.
 

The 1998 Robert Wood Johnson Community Health Leaders are pictured below, from left to right.  Top row:  Tony Garr founded the Tennessee Health Care Campaign to advocate the health needs of the state's most vulnerable people. He convinced the state to fund a toll-free health line for the growing Spanish-speaking population and help revitalize a county health center that now offers employment counseling, housing assistance, and child care services.  Sandra Vining-Bethea created the outreach services of the Greater Bridgeport Adolescent Pregnancy Program to bring HIV/AIDS prevention and drug treatment to teens and young adults on the streets and in the housing projects of Connecticut's largest city.  Tim Lefens, a Belle Meade, N.J., artist started Artistic Realization Technologies (A.R.T.) to help individuals with severe physical disabilities express themselves in art.  Sumiko Tanaka Hennessy, PhD, co-founded the Asian Pacific Development Center, which offers a wide range of services including mental health counseling, substance abuse treatment, and HIV/AIDS prevention education, as well as childcare and after-school activities to Asian immigrants in Denver, Colo.  Steven Schroeder, MD, RWJF president.  Steve Ohly, RN, MSN, created and now manages Aurora Health Care Department of Family Medicine¹s free clinic based in a supermarket, which uses a volunteer staff to provide much-needed primary and urgent care in central Milwaukee.  Nancy Johns DiVenere reaches out to families with disabled children as director of Parent to Parent of Vermont. She helped establish a partnership with the University of Vermont College of Medicine that brings medical students and residents into the homes of children with chronic illnesses so that they can work closely with and learn from parents and children.  Joseph DiCara, MD, MPH, created and directs Chicago Youth Programs, which provides safe recreation, education, career guidance, injury prevention, and youth development programs to young people in city housing projects.  Bottom row:  Maria Contreras founded Soldiers of Health, a neighbor-to-neighbor outreach program in Roxbury, Mass., where "soldiers" walk the streets to discover first hand the concerns of the residents and then link people to needed health, social, and educational services.  Jennie C. Trotter, MEd, started the Wholistic Stress Control Institute to provide health education and violence-prevention programs to grade-school children and their parents in a predominantly African-American area of Atlanta.  Not pictured: Reverend Kenneth S. Robinson, MD, St. Andrew A.M.E. Church, offers spiritual, education, and health programs for children and adults in South Memphis, Tenn., where half the residents live below the poverty line.