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Prevention Institute began partnering with Sheila Savannah around 2007 when she was in a leadership role at the Houston Health Department. She had joined as Houston’s representative to our UNITY City Network, a group of health departments and mayors’ offices representing the largest cities in the U.S. that were advancing a public health approach to community safety and gun violence prevention. Immediately, we benefitted from Sheila’s unwavering commitment to systemic impact and partnership with communities. She willingly shared her challenges and successes—strengthening our collective capacity—and represented Houston and the Network at forums across the country.
Sheila joined our Prevention Institute team in January 2015 and began leading our mental health and wellbeing work. In this space, Sheila led us deeper into authentic community engagement with communities who were most impacted and catalyzed a shift in the field from a conflation of mental health with mental illness or mental health problems to a focus on "wellbeing" to reinforce the positive state of mental health and wellbeing we are working toward. This helped us as an organization to center the strengths of communities—in both built and cultural environments—as powerful determinants of wellbeing.
In November 2018, Sheila joined our senior leadership team and has served in this capacity ever since. With a keen eye to our national sphere of influence and supporting capacity building throughout the organization, Sheila has developed strong teams while supporting individual staff and partner growth along the way. She also launched our Houston/Texas-based office, which allowed us to not only look at similarities across the locales we call home, but also learn to navigate different political climates in partnership with others working locally to advance common goals.
Inspired in part by adrienne maree brown, Sheila has always encouraged us to go a mile deep instead of a mile wide. Under her leadership, we have explored deeper and more authentic relationships within communities of practice, enduring efforts with essential partners, and a more intentional approach to how we engage those who aren’t always invited to decision-making tables and make sure that the tools, frameworks, and resources we are developing, truly work for them. Sheila’s commitment to meaningful outcomes and impact took us deeper into analyzing the results across our work, including forming and sponsoring our first cross-organizational impact and metrics team. Here she developed team capacity to better understand how we are doing and how to translate that into continuous improvement in advance of our mission.
Sheila’s long-planned and well-deserved retirement comes at the end of March. With our hearts full of gratitude for all she is and all she has shared with us—we are stronger and more impactful because of it. We wish Sheila well deserved congratulations and best wishes as she spends more time with family and on advancing social justice art practices.
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