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Staff Q+A: Catherine Craig, Health Integration

Catherine Craig has worked with people and communities from the Philippines to Latin America. As Director of Health Integration at Community Solutions, she oversees elements of just about every major project we're working on. In this month's staff Q+A, we caught up with Catherine to learn more about her work to end homelessness, improve health outcomes, and build efficient systems to ensure that families and individuals can thrive in permanent housing. Don't miss her take on the unexpected connections between psychiatric social work and large-scale systems change!

Q. How would you explain your job as Director of Health Integration?

A. I wear a few hats, all under the rubric of deploying health care as an engine of social change. In the 100,000 Homes Campaign, I help communities leverage the support of health care players - hospitals, clinics, pharmacies - as partners in the local work of ending homelessness, and I work with hospitals and health care providers to help them see opportunities for their work to be a part of ending homelessness. In our place-based work, I guide the convening of local partners who represent all the social determinants of health - where we live, work and play - schools, church, corner stores, tenant associations, doctors. Together with the people living in these high-need neighborhoods, we are working to transform health, safety and economic outcomes.

Q. What got you interested in doing something like that?

A.  I am constantly impressed with the amazing strategies that people living in difficult circumstances use to keep on going, but I am also convinced that we can improve people's life circumstances dramatically by streamlining systems. There are so many different systems set up to help people, but they are usually fragmented, sometimes duplicative, and often tied to narrow definitions of success. Currently, most health care and social service systems are better designed to meet isolated needs than to foster independence, resilience and good health. We convene key players in these systems to imagine better care for people struggling with multiple needs. I think we’ve seen that, if we work together, we can transform extreme vulnerability into a leverage point for a healthy life.  

Q. What did you do before joining the Community Solutions team?

A. My background is in psychiatric social work. Over the years, I've worked with in community settings from Latin America to the Philippines with everyone from teenage parents to artists with developmental disabilities and people with psychiatric disabilities. I joined the Community Solutions team after leading city-wide improvement projects with the NYC Dept of Health, where I guided community-based mental health centers to implement person-driven, recovery-oriented interventions.

Q. What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned in the course of your job?

A. It has been amazing to me to see the energy that sweeps through a room full of people when the issue they have been working on for years suddenly begins to feel solvable. In a way, it’s the same thing that I like about working with individuals - naming a goal, believing it’s possible, working together to get there. I once did some work on the value of hope in recovery in schizophrenia, and in some ways it’s the same lesson learned at the systems level - we all do better when we're hopeful, and when the people around us share that hope.

Good social work hinges on co-discovering what various thought patterns and behaviors might offer to the person who experiences them. It’s so compelling to take that thinking to the systems level and ask questions like, “How do Medicaid funding constraints serve the various people involved? What's the driving motivation?” and then, “Is there a new avenue to meet everyone's goals more effectively?”

Q. What do you do when you're not helping Community Solutions end homelessness and strengthen communities?

A. Lately, I have been relaxing by cooking, and I try to do yoga every day.