ORDER-2020-82 : Appointment of Carol Ann Licitra, 308 East Foster St., to the Board of Health for a three-year term; said term to expire on the last day of February 2023

Transcript (~17 min @ 17:33)

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▶ 17:29 Speaker 1: good in the city so thank you bring in the next candidate so the next item on

▶ 17:34 Jack Eccles: our agenda is order 2020-82 appointment of Carol Ann Lisitra 308 East Foster Street to the Board of Health for a three-year term said term to expire on the last day of February 2020 it looks like we have still the mayor and miss

▶ 17:55 Paul Brodeur: and Mr. True or Ms. Lisa True with us as well thank you Mr. chairman again I appreciate the opportunity to bring forward an outstanding nominee you may think to yourself in the current state of affairs who would possibly want to sign up for a for a tour duty on the on the board of health but I will say this we got a tremendous amount of interest in this both before and and as the COVID epidemic started to come on the radar and really got an outstanding cross-section of candidates. The reason why I'm bringing forward Ms. Lucitra is to fill a role in terms of mental health. So we have, as you all know, we have a doctor and a nurse on the commission and in this present time and going forward, We all know how much an important part of our work is going to be making sure that both physical and mental health is a part of what we do in terms of meeting community needs. We've talked about it before COVID in the context of general services and also around anxiety throughout our school system and how to deal with that in particular. There will be ongoing challenges, non-COVID related, that we still have to keep our eye on, and I am confident that Ms. LaCitra will do that. She has a tremendously interesting background in that she was a professional banker or VP at, I want to say, Bay Bank before she changed careers and went into mental health and counseling. and in particular I want to draw your attention to her time at the Fenway Community Health Center which is a tremendous place that really deals with a lot of challenges with safety net and providing a full spectrum of services to make sure that people are getting getting what they need mental health being an important part of that so I am delighted to bring forward her nomination and urge her swift confirmation so she can be a commissioner at Wednesday night's Board of Health meeting. Carol can you hear us?

▶ 20:15 Speaker 4: I can I'm also on video can you see me or am I not? You're not visible do you

▶ 20:20 Speaker 1: have a little there should be a bunch of buttons at the bottom of your screen the second one if your access laptop is a video. Okay it says um you can't connect

▶ 20:29 Speaker 4: your webcam okay I might if you can give me one second I might have just need to close out of another app sorry about that okay should be okay in a second I'm

▶ 20:56 Speaker 4: not technologically savvy but I do promise hi okay well thank you very much mayor Broder and their Eccles and as you said I it's interesting that this is all happening at such a time. I was interested in the board prior to coronavirus upsetting our lives, but it felt even more urgent, obviously, over these past several weeks. So, yes, as the mayor said, I do have an interesting background in that I didn't start out in mental health, although my role in the banking world was really one of client relations. And over my almost 20-year tenure there, I actually just came to understand that what I really liked about banking wasn't banking, but it was about the people and working as part of a team, part of a community. We actually provided services to municipalities throughout the state, in particular their retirement systems. So I often had the charge of meeting with the boards or with the administrative of staff and really making relationships the center of what work we did with them. So I found at that time that you can really accomplish a lot by establishing good relationships. And after my own health crisis in the mid-90s, I decided to go back to grad school. I was out of work with the bank for a while, and I just realized that I wanted to focus more of my energy on the people aspect and on giving back to the health care community, because it helped me greatly through my struggle. So I did that. And as the mayor said, I worked at a community health center for several years when I first became a counselor. I worked in the medical social work department, even though I'm not technically a social worker, but the role really suited me. And we work primarily with AIDS patients, although it was a community health center and we did see you know many a broader population including addictions and whatnot but my role was really to sort of not only case manage these cases but to bring the teams together that were needed to really address all of the issues including you know the medical needs the community needs and mental health needs as well so when this opportunity came along I kind of felt that I had a lot of of the right qualifications to sort of join a community um effort to you know again work as part of a team and bring together some of these things that I had have seen and worked on in the past I've been in private practice since um about 2005 I work I currently have a practice here in Melrose and while I love working with my individual and family clients I do really do miss being part of an organization, a larger organization, and working with a multidisciplinary team. So I think that that's something that we'll really enjoy, given the opportunity, and that I'll really bring a lot to that aspect of the work. So thank you for your consideration, and that's pretty much my shtick.

▶ 24:20 Jack Eccles: Thank you. President Galerios? Thank you.

▶ 24:24 Jen Grigoraitis: Thank you. As the counselor for Ward 6, I'm thrilled to have you here this evening and to support your nomination. And I think having someone with your depth and breadth of mental health services is going to be a critical addition to the Board of Health. I think the mental health effects from this crisis are going to be long-reaching in a way that none of us have ever experienced, and I'm just very grateful to you for offering your time and talent to such a crucial commission here in the city. So, thank you.

▶ 24:52 Speaker 4: Thank you.

▶ 24:55 Speaker 5: Vice Chair Trimaldi.

▶ 24:57 Maya Jamaleddine: Thank you, Chair. Thank you so much, Ms. El-Setra, for stepping up and I really appreciate everything you did and I'm impressed with the background as well. What is the most important thing that you feel that the community and our city should focus on, especially after this pandemic, knowing that a lot of individuals will be suffering from PTSD, from a lot of

▶ 25:34 Speaker 4: mental health issues? Yeah, I think one of the things I'm seeing daily, not only in our own family lives, but in the people I work with, is it sounds very simple, but it's really quite challenging, just the aspect of readjusting. Almost every day since this has come about in our lives, we're readjusting to the smallest things and to the biggest things. Everything we do, the way we spend our days, the way we teach our children. And I'm finding that the longer this goes on, the level of anxiety is increasing. It's very difficult to live in a time where there's so much uncertainty. I think we all know that, but I think we don't know, as you've intimated, the long-reaching results of such an adjustment. So what I try to do with the people I'm working with currently is to really help them put that into perspective. It's not about quickly figuring out what we have to do today to get through the day, although that is important. I think this will be something that we will slowly have to continuously reassess as we start to move back being again involved in our work outside the home in our community in the services our community brings so I think it is yet to be known what that will be but as you said PTSD anxiety depression how do people reconnect when we're supposed to not be connecting so those are some of the of my areas of interest that i think will be very important to address together with the board

▶ 27:21 Shawn M. MacMaster: and the city thank you thank you big master thank you mr chairman good evening mrs licitor appreciate you being here and thank you for your willingness to serve um you mentioned some uh hiv aids related work was that clinical work that you did um when you were in graduate school no

▶ 27:34 Speaker 4: No, that was after graduate school. I did an internship at Fenway for a year, but then I was hired there. So I worked there for, I believe it was about seven years. So my clinical work was counseling and was case management related. I also ran some groups, support groups and therapy groups for patients. Again, not just HIV and AIDS, although that was primarily my caseload, but general population and other medical issues that people have.

▶ 28:06 Shawn M. MacMaster: And what was the area of study that you focused on in graduate school and was there a clinical placement or a thesis that gives us some sense of your interest beyond some of the things that you've already talked about?

▶ 28:22 Speaker 4: Yeah, the other internship I did was at a cancer support group establishment rather that offered support groups. to folks living with cancer. So my interest in grad school was working with people who had terminal illness. So I majored in a counseling, straight individual counseling. Can't think of the word I'm looking for, but in any event, it was a clinical mental health in individual counseling. They offered, I went to Lesley University for that degree, earned a master's. We didn't do a thesis or a research project at that time. It was mostly the actual internship experience that we focused on. I also worked at Simmons College for a part of my internship year doing college counseling. So I worked again in a really multidisciplinary type of a setting, but focused on individual work with students at the time.

▶ 29:24 Shawn M. MacMaster: Thank you. And one of the things that Fenway Community Health is known for is its work with the LGBTQ community. I'm wondering whether or not you've had an opportunity to work at all at Fenway Health with that community and then based on some of the schoolwork that you just referenced, if you have really any ideas or thoughts on ways that the Board of Health might be able to work collaboratively with some other departments in terms of raising awareness with the public or in terms of prevention?

▶ 29:59 Speaker 4: With the LBGTQ community?

▶ 30:01 Speaker 2: Yeah, especially LGBTQ, yes.

▶ 30:03 Speaker 4: Yes, well, I'm a lesbian and we have a child and we are part of this community. And when we moved to Melrose years ago, not knowing it, I was very surprised and encouraged by the rich community there already is here in Melrose. So we've been involved. I've been involved personally in some of those efforts, you know, Pride Month and whatnot, but nothing specific to helping in the mental health area. But, of course, that would be an area of interest of mine. I do. My caseload, in fact, includes quite a bit of both families and individuals in the community, both in Melrose and outside, but in the gay community. So, I don't have anything in particular off the top of my head that I've been thinking about. I've been really more focused on the medical aspect, but certainly open to exploring those concerns.

▶ 31:01 Shawn M. MacMaster: Thank you. I think, you know, historically, the Board of Health, by virtue of what it does, is very reactive to what may be happening at a particular time in which it needs to invest itself. And there may be opportunities for us to identify some important public health related issues work across other city departments. And, you know, and along with the mayor to maybe raise some awareness at an early point before an issue may spiral where we have to intervene. You mentioned your multidisciplinary work, which I think is very impressive. One of the things about the field of public health, as you know, is it's all encompassing. It's very broad. So whether it's a virus like COVID-19 or an issue like domestic violence, misuse, biohazard or waste spills or food safety in restaurants, any number of issues. And certainly, we can never expect one person to be an expert on all of those issues. But knowing that at any particular meeting, you might be dealing with an issue with which you maybe don't have a level of expertise. How would you look to approach issues that maybe are not within your comfort level and maybe, you know, something new for you?

▶ 32:21 Speaker 4: Yeah, well, I'm really glad you brought that question up because that was one of my, you know, sort of going into this. I realized, you know, while I do have a range of experience and I'm a little bit on the older side, So I have life experience as well. I certainly don't know everything about how a city functions, how a city operates or the needs of its community. But again, that's an area for me that kind of is I welcome that. I'm curious. I want to know about what people want, need. That's how I approach my work, actually. You know, I don't assume that I know what somebody's needs are or even what they're feeling without really giving them a chance to explore and explain that together. So that's what I loved about working as part of a team is that everybody brings something and you really can accomplish a lot. So I would approach that just in the same way. I would be interested in learning, being open to different opinions and thoughts about things, and really being able to sort of put that all in the mix and come to an understanding through that. I hope that answers your question.

▶ 33:29 Shawn M. MacMaster: it does thank you very much and i look forward to supporting your nomination this evening

▶ 33:39 Jack Eccles: thank you very much any other uh voting or non-voting members for the first time well i i am excited to support your nomination as well miss blackburn we spoke on the phone briefly on friday so um at this time i'll get my notions on the floor motion to recommend for

▶ 34:01 Jack Eccles: passage second motion to recommend for passage came from councillor mcnaught second by councillor

▶ 34:08 Speaker 1: McLaurelli. Madam Clerk, will you please call the roll? Councilor Jamaleddine? Yes. Councilor McMaster? Yes. Councilor McNaught? Yes. Councilor McLaurelli? Yes. President Grigoraitis? Yes. Chair Eccles?

▶ 34:24 Jack Eccles: Yes. Five yes. Congratulations, Ms. LeCitra. This will be voted on later tonight at the full

▶ 34:29 Speaker 4: council meeting. Thank you so much. I appreciate your time and your questions. Thank you. Thank you.

▶ 34:36 Jack Eccles: thank you um the next and last item on tonight's agenda is order 2020-80 reappointment of daniel o'neill 340 main street number 703 to the cemetery commission for a three-year term set to expire on the last day of february 2023 uh mayor bretter do you have