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[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E24-E25]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE PASSING OF LORETTA JONES
______
HON. KAREN BASS
of california
in the house of representatives
Wednesday, January 9, 2019
Ms. BASS. Madam Speaker, I would like to honor the life and memory of
a pioneer in the field of health policy, my long-time friend, colleague
and fellow organizer, Dr. Loretta Jones, who passed away on November
22.
She was a founding member of the Community Coalition for substance
abuse Prevention and Treatment. In fact, she was the first staff person
hired and developed the Coalition's Prevention Network. That network
brought together social service providers from South LA to address
substance abuse in the community.
Loretta had a towering passion for justice and a caregiver's
attention to detail. She founded Healthy African American Families
(HAAF) in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising to engage
universities, think tanks, and community members together to seek
solutions to longstanding health problems, including the scourge of
pre-term births in the African American community. For this work she
received two honorary doctorates and, last year, she received the UCLA
Medal, the university's highest honor, for her career of working to
address inequalities in health and health outcomes.
She is best known for co-developing methods that give underserved
communities a greater role in planning and implementing academic
research. Community-Partnered Participatory Research (CPPR) calls for
transparency, accountability and equal power-sharing between academics
and communities. In 2007, with UCLA professor Kenneth Wells, she
published the CCPR model in the Journal of the American Medical
Association.
In doing so, she demonstrated another tenet of CPPR--that community
members co-author research publications alongside academics.
[[Page E25]]
Loretta had that rare ability to serve as a bridge between the worlds
of policy and research, and the everyday lives of the people she cared
about most. She mentored hundreds of physicians, nurses, public health
practitioners, social scientists and community members to do the same.
Those people went on to become tenured faculty members at medical
schools, state officials and senior advisers in Congress and the White
House.
A native of Massachusetts, she earned a BA in psychology in 1963 and
Master's degree in criminal justice in 1972, both from Northeastern
University in Boston. She had been a community faculty member at
Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science since 2010. A former
foster youth herself, she fostered 20 children in addition to raising
her daughter. She made a real difference in the world during her 77
years.
Loretta always insisted that ``Everyone deserves the right to live,
everyone deserves good health care, and we are all responsible for
making it happen.'' I mourn her passing with all of those who loved
her. I am grateful for her compassion, her dedication, and the work to
which she dedicated her life: to empower families to lead truly healthy
lives.
____________________