Thanks to all of our sponsors and supporters for making the 23rd Annual Spring Awards Breakfast a joyful morning.

We connected with friends old and new, celebrated our public health heroes, and felt the power of coming together for health, justice, and community. Congratulations again to the 2025 awardees:

The Paul Revere Award for outstanding leadership in public health will be presented to Grace Sterling Stowell, MSW, Executive Director of BAGLY (The Boston Alliance of LGBTQ+ Youth)
The newly named Augustus Hinton Award for Public Health Leadership in Medicine Award will be presented to Shari Nethersole, M.D., Vice President, Community Health and Engagement, Boston Children’s Hospital

The Lemuel Shattuck Award for significant contributions to public health practice will be awarded to Cheryl Sbarra, J.D., Executive Director of the Massachusetts Association of Health Boards

The Local Public Health Leadership Award for those working within the field of municipal public health will be presented to Victoria Selser, Epidemiologist with the City of Fitchburg

Thanks to all of YOU we raised over $135,000 for MPHA. A special shout out to the breakfast attendees who helped us surpass our in-event fundraising goal by donating $23,000 to support our work and reach this goal.

View the breakfast photo gallery here.

Click here to read the full press release including quotes from the awardees and DPH Commissioner Robbie Goldstein.

We are especially grateful to the Host Committee, co-chaired by  Cheryl Bartlett, MPHA’s Development Committee Co-Chair and former Lemuel Shattuck Awardee, and  Harold Cox, Professor of Practice at BU School of Public Health and former Paul Revere Awardee.

We also heard from Massachusetts Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Robbie Goldstein who addressed this pivotal moment in time “for public health, for our country, for our future, for democracy, and for truth.” To demonstrate his point that “public health is not just about science, it’s an act of patriotism,” Commissioner Goldstein recounted that Paul Revere was the country’s first public health officer and President George Washington let “science, courage and conviction” lead his decision to inoculate the entire Continental Army against smallpox.

It is also patriotic to be explicit about the often-suppressed history of smallpox inoculation in this country. It was Onesimus, an enslaved Black man from West Africa, who first shared the long-practiced technique of variolation (a form of inoculation) in response to a 1721 outbreak of smallpox in the Massachusetts colony.

So, let’s be patriotic and continue to advance public health together all year long!

To find out how you can be part of MPHA’s work for health equity, please contact MPHA’s Development Manager, Ana Hidalgo, at ahidalgo@mapublichealth.org or 857-302-7256.