Founding Organizers

Luis Antonio Báez (Tony), Ph.DTonyBaez_Photo

Dr. Tony Báez is currently the President/CEO of the Council for the Spanish Speaking, Inc. in Milwaukee. For the past 37 years, Dr. Báez has been involved with civil rights issues, educational and health reform and community-based education. In Wisconsin and at the national level, he has been a leader in Latino education; parent involvement in schools; at-risk youth issues; bilingual and multicultural education; adult education and ESL; Latino health and immigration; and, has developed educational plans for several large urban school districts in the U.S. Most recently, Dr. Báez has focused on urban high school reform, immigrant and civil rights issues, health education, and in enhancing the capacity of nonprofits to better serve and engage people of color in social change.

Carolina picCarolina Gonzales-Schlenker, MD, MPH

Carolina came to the US as an exchange medical student and after three years went back to Mexico. She did an internship in general medicine at an urban hospital of the Mexican Ministry of Health in her home town of Tampico. Then she worked in community medicine in the highlands of Chiapas for two years in Tojolabal Mayan Indian communities training health promoters and practicing primary care. She married Tom Schlenker, MD, MPH and came back to the US. She has many years of working as a health advocate for Latinos and was co-founder and first president of the Latino Health Organization in 1994. She moved to Utah where she obtained a Master in Public Health with a concentration on quality of care. She then moved to Mexico and did research on the health system there. Back to Wisconsin in 2000 she has been doing community-based participatory research. She uses theatre to engage community members to project better futures and test them. She is currently a post-doctoral fellow on health disparities at the Center for Women’s Health Research of UW Madison. Her main research interest is creating informational tools that can serve as a bridge between primary care providers and the people´s experience of disease.  She has three sons.

Ana PaulaAna Paula Soares Lynch, MS, CPC

Ana Paula Soares Lynch is a state certified professional counselor with a Masters degree in Community and Clinical Psychology. In addition to her private practice, she is the co-director of Proyecto Salud, a joint project of CORE/El Centro and Aurora Walker’s Point Community Clinic, and the co-founder of the Milwaukee Latino Health Coalition (MLHC). Ana Paula has been working to implement an ecological approach to public health were community grassroots leadership is combined with community agencies, universities and government agencies to decrease health disparities and improve the quality of life of our Milwaukee Latino community. Ana Paula has developed and implemented a culturally competent curriculum to train and empower community health promoters in Milwaukee. She is now supervising the development of different projects lead by health promoters in many agencies in the Milwaukee and West Allis area.

SherriSherri Ohly, BSW

Sherri Ohly is the co-director and co-founder of Proyecto Salud, a joint project of CORE/El Centro and Aurora Walker’s Point Community Clinic.  She is also a founding member of the Milwaukee Latino Health Coalition. Her work is to address health holistically, respecting personal beliefs, immigrant concerns, and other systemic factors that influence the choice of healthy behaviors. Sherri embraces an ecological perspective that honors community wisdom and integrates professional knowledge in order to foster a community that embraces spiritual, mental and physical health as its primary goal. Her passion for health and wellness for the Latino community has its roots in her being a teacher of a group fitness class, Nia, which she has been teaching in the Latino community for ten years.  Sherri has a degree in Social Work from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee where as a student and beyond she served on the board of the National Association of Social Workers- Wisconsin Chapter, sparking her interest in improving public health through policy change.

AmandaAmanda Schultz, MPH

Amanda Schultz is a graduate of the University of Illinois-Chicago School of Public Health. As a UW-Population Health Fellow she trained at the Milwaukee Health Department and Proyecto Salud, a joint project of CORE/El Centro and Aurora Walker’s Point Community Clinic, in the largely Latino Milwaukee south side. At the Milwaukee Health Department, she conducted research for the development of a new Men’s Health Division and identified clinical care sites to place TB patients. At Proyecto Salud Amanda worked on the evaluation of community-based health promoter programs and upstream causes of illness within diverse and marginalized communities.  Amanda is currently living in Honduras where she is continuing to use her public health, community-based education to better community health.