Grace Sterling Stowell, Executive Director at BAGLY

Paul Revere Awardee

The Paul Revere Award is MPHA’s highest honor and is reserved for those who have made an outstanding impact on public health in the Commonwealth. The recipient of this award shall have made a significant contribution to the promotion and development of public health in Massachusetts, as well as consistently demonstrated initiative, ability, leadership, and a commitment to equity in their work in the field. 

Grace Sterling Stowell has been a pioneering activist and leader in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) youth, transgender and social justice communities for over 40 years.

As a gender non-conforming child growing up queer and transgender in the 1960s, Grace’s personal experiences of harassment, discrimination, and violence served as a catalyst for her activism in the feminist, racial justice, holistic health, and LGBTQ movements of the 1970s.

In 1980, Grace joined the founders of the newly formed Boston Alliance of LGBTQ Youth (BAGLY), one of the earliest LGBTQ youth groups in the nation. As BAGLY’s first (and only) executive director, Grace led youth and adult leaders in its expansion from a Boston-based, all-volunteer, grassroots social support group, to an established statewide non-profit organization, including the AGLY Network of Massachusetts. BAGLY’s youth-led programs were among the first of their kind, and have served as a local and national model and resource for LGBTQ youth leadership development and community organizing.

In the 1990s, Grace was a leader in the pioneering national movement to expand community organizing, advocacy, and support for the LGBTQ youth and transgender communities. Grace was a founding member of several local and national LGBTQ youth and transgender advocacy organizations, including the National Youth Advocacy Coalition (NYAC) for LGBTQ youth, and she is believed to be the first openly transgender person to address the health care issues of trans youth with senior staff at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, GA.

As executive director of BAGLY, founding member of both the MA Commission on LGBTQ Youth and the MA Unaccompanied Homeless Youth Commission, Steering Committee member of the MA Transgender Political Coalition, and Board member of Breaktime, Grace continues to advocate for the needs of LGBTQ youth and transgender communities throughout the Commonwealth. Most recently, Grace was among the leaders of the successful effort to add gender identity to the Massachusetts non-discrimination laws in 2011, expand gender identity protections in public accommodations in 2016, and defend gender identity protections at the statewide ballot box as part of the Freedom MA Yes On 3 Campaign in 2018.

Grace is now the longest-tenured transgender executive director in the nation (and one of the few leading a non-trans-specific organization), and she has been the recipient of numerous awards for her work, including the National LGBTQ Task Force’s “Susan J. Hyde Activism Award for Longevity in the Movement” award in 2010. While Grace has served many roles in her community work over the past four decades, she remains especially honored to be known as “Mother” (and now “Grandmother!”) by three generations of LGBTQ youth.

Shari Nethersole, MD, Vice President, Community Health and Engagement at Boston Children’s Hospital

Augustus Hinton Awardee

The Augustus Hinton Award for Public Health Leadership in Medicine is reserved for those who have made an extraordinary commitment to bringing public health principles and partnerships into the practice of medicine, combining the clinical and public health side of the equation in their delivery of services or programs.

Shari Nethersole, MD, Vice President for Community Health and Engagement at Boston Children’s Hospital, oversees the Office of Community Health and Boston Children’s community mission. Dr. Nethersole and her team collaborate with staff and providers across the hospital, as well as community organizations, health centers, schools, and city and state agencies to address health disparities and improve health outcomes for children and families.  

Dr. Nethersole joined the Office of Community Health as Medical Director in 2004 before becoming Executive Director and then Vice President. She was instrumental in working with clinical and program teams to develop and implement the Community Asthma Initiative, which has proven to be a cost-effective model for improving health outcomes for children with asthma. She also created the Fitness in the City program, which is the hospital’s community-based program in partnership with 11 community health centers to help children meet their weight and health goals.  

With her leadership, Boston Children’s opened a food panty in January 2022 that is a unique collaboration with the Boston Housing Authority. It is located in a public housing development next to the Martha Eliot Health Center, making it accessible to residents and patient families. The site now serves more than 800 visitors per week.  

She also oversees the direction of the hospital’s community health initiatives in agreement with the state’s Department of Public Health. The Collaboration for Community Health, which launched in 2018, has supported and convened more than 60 community organizations and their projects to address the health and social determinants of the health of children and families.   

Dr. Nethersole has promoted and overseen Boston Children’s role as an Anchor Institution in Boston and has overseen the creation of an Impact Investment fund, which has provided crucial investments in housing and educational facilities for families. 

Dr. Nethersole continues to provide care for patients and supervise residents at Boston Children’s Primary Care Center. She received her undergraduate degree in Biology from Yale University in 1979 and her medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1983. She did her pediatric residency at Boston Children’s. She directed pediatrics at a Boston community health center for 4 years after residency and returned to Boston Children’s as an attending physician in 1990.

Cheryl Sbarra, Executive Director at Massachusetts Association of Health Boards

Lemuel Shattuck Awardee

The Lemuel Shattuck Award is awarded to a person who has made or is making a major contribution to the betterment of public health practice. The recipient should live and/or work in New England for the greater part of their career. 

Cheryl Sbarra is the Executive Director and Senior Staff Attorney for the Massachusetts Association of Health Boards (MAHB). She provides technical assistance, policy guidance, and legal education to the 351 local boards of health in Massachusetts. Sbarra assists them and other municipal officials and attorneys in developing, enacting, and enforcing local regulations, ordinances, and bylaws.

Sbarra heads a staff of legal consultants and policy experts for MAHB, who provide legal education and technical assistance to local boards of health regarding chronic disease prevention policies, cross-jurisdictional sharing of public health services, tobacco control ,and cannabis policies, opioid abatement settlement strategies, and strategies to increase the capacity of local boards of health and health departments across the state.

She has presented at numerous state and national conferences on public health legal issues, including—but not limited to—tobacco control, cannabis and synthetic CBD and THC regulations, enforcement strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic, cross-jurisdictional sharing, and general legal authority and enforcement issues for local boards of health.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Tufts University and a Juris Doctor Degree from Suffolk University Law School.

Victoria Selser, Epidemiologist, City of Fitchburg

Local Public Health Leadership Awardee

The Local Public Health Leadership Award is reserved for someone who has made a great impact in their community by service working directly in municipal local public health. The recipient of this award shall have contributed their efforts to a more equitable, efficient, and effective local public health system. Special consideration will be given to those working in contexts of few resources and great need. 

Victoria Selser is an Epidemiologist with the City of Fitchburg Health Department and the Montachusett Public Health Network, a regional collaborative of local health departments in north central MA. Her public health journey began during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, just as she was completing her undergraduate degree in microbiology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As Massachusetts was scaling up the pandemic response, Victoria joined the public health workforce in April 2020 as a Contact Tracer for the Community Tracing Collaborative (CTC) – a joint project between the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the global health nonprofit Partners in Health (PIH). She later transferred to the specialized unit within the CTC known as the Epidemic Intelligence Unit, where her role as an Outbreak Specialist involved collaborating with local health departments to identify, investigate, and respond to suspected outbreaks of COVID-19. Victoria’s experience of working with PIH shaped her views on health equity and justice and fostered her commitment to improving health outcomes.  

Following the closure of the CTC in December 2021, Victoria transitioned to her current role as a local health Epidemiologist. In this role, her responsibilities range from analyzing data to evaluate community health needs to administering community-based clinical and educational public health interventions, to grant-writing, to managing and responding to reportable conditions. Most notably, Victoria identified gaps in healthcare access in her communities and worked to establish a free clinic, now formally known as the North Central Free Medical Program.  She also currently serves on NACCHO’s Epidemiology Workgroup.