Monthly Public Health Consultant Spotlight: Rachel Sacks, MPH
Each month, I will introduce you to a public health consultant or entrepreneur and they will share their path to self-employment and outline key pieces of advice for aspiring business owners.
Today we welcome Rachel Sacks from Chicago, IL (USA)!
1. Please share your educational background and business title/name.
President, Leading Healthy Futures
Degree: Master of Public Health (MPH)
2. Tell us how you entered the field of public health and what your education and work experience was prior to consulting or starting your own business.
I have always been passionate about public health – even before I knew the term! I had some amazing nonprofit volunteer and internship experiences in high school and college that exposed me to the vast inequities in access to care and what I would later understand to be social determinants of health. As an undergraduate at Northwestern University, I thought about if I might want to go into nursing, but I was much more interested in systems-level rather than individual level issues. I was also always more interested in taking classes about bioethics, the history of science, or gender issues in medicine than taking actual hard sciences. I ended up being a History and Science in Human Culture double major and writing an honors thesis on the history of public health nursing.
After college, I worked for three years at the Center for Jewish Genetics, doing education and outreach in the Jewish and medical communities around genetics, reproductive health, family health history, and hereditary cancer. It was during this time that I started to better understand the field of public health and decided I wanted to go to graduate school at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health, where I studied community health sciences. After obtaining my MPH, I spent four years working at the Illinois Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics (ICAAP), where I delivered presentations to childcare providers about connecting families to health insurance coverage when the Affordable Care Act was new, facilitated conversations of diverse stakeholders on topics relating to well-child care and early childhood development, and did a fair amount of grant writing to both private funders and Federal agencies.
3. When did you start your business and what were your motivations for pursuing self-employment?
Unlike many business owners, I am not a founder and actually did not set out to pursue self-employment.
In 2015, after several years at ICAAP, I was ready for a new challenge and discovered the small consulting firm Leading Healthy Futures, where I would be able to put my grant writing, group facilitation, and other skills to work helping a wider variety of nonprofits. I loved the varied nature of consulting work and also relished the opportunity to learn from Leading Healthy Futures’ founder and CEO, Pam Xichel Cairns. Pam had decades of experience in executive leadership, grants management, governance, and operations, including once serving as President and CEO of Erie Family Health Center, one of Chicago’s largest Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). I learned so much under her mentorship.
Tragically, in 2018, Pam was given a terminal diagnosis and was very suddenly no longer able to continue working. Practically overnight, I faced a very unexpected immediate decision between taking over the firm’s ownership and leadership, or looking for a new job. It was a scary decision to make at the time – especially amidst so much grief – but I knew it was the right choice to keep doing this type of mission-driven consulting work for health and human services nonprofits. I’m grateful every day to be able to honor Pam’s memory and continue her legacy.
4. Who is your ideal client? What services do you offer?
Our ideal clients are community health centers, public health departments, small community hospitals, mental health agencies, and other health and human services nonprofits like domestic violence agencies. We provide them with three primary types of services: needs assessments, strategic planning, and grants. Our mixed-methods community health needs assessments help organizations meet regulatory requirements, better understand their communities, and inform future strategic plans and grants. Our strategic planning processes and other collaborative facilitations help organizations gain clarity and consensus on strategy. And, probably our biggest service line, our grant acquisition services include grant coaching and training, customized grant prospect research, developing full grant applications including major federal submissions, and even helping funders with grant review and award processes.
5. What is your favorite type of project to work on and why?
I have a particular love of conducting needs assessments. I feel like they bring together some of my favorite activities and really take advantage of our team’s skills in writing and data analysis. We like to take a mixed-methods approach, incorporating both quantitative and qualitative data. We’ll dive into quantitative data from the Census Bureau, CDC, and other sources to examine the socioeconomic needs and health disparities of a community, which allows my colleague Lauren and me to geek out over data. But we’ll also use focus groups, interviews, or community surveys to further understand real people’s perceptions of the needs of the community, and what changes they want to see. I especially love the perspectives that come from these qualitative approaches and I think weaving the two together results in a richer needs assessment.
Needs assessments are also such a valuable input into a strategic planning process or major grant. We often conduct some sort of current state assessment that considers community needs when we’re launching a strategic planning project, because you can’t plan where you are going if you don’t know where you are. We also often examine a particular geographic area’s needs as part of making the case for new sites or services, such as in major federal grants for FQHCs.
6. How has your consulting business been impacted by COVID-19? What adjustments have you made in order to continue to be successful?
We certainly saw some of our service lines shift over 2020. A number of needs assessment and strategic planning projects became deprioritized or fell through as so many of our clients had to focus on COVID-19 testing, treatment, PPE, community health education, contact tracing, and now vaccination. Many of our health department clients were far too slammed for “nice to have” things like facilitation of planning meetings, and some types of grant submissions we regularly do for FQHCs were actually paused or given extensions by the federal government in light of the pandemic.
At the same time, many nonprofit organizations experienced greater urgency around grants. We wrote a number of last minute emergency response grants or applications for COVID-specific opportunities such as expanded telehealth. We also provided a great deal of coaching and grant prospect research services to nonprofits looking to diversify their funding streams. The space created by projects that did not occur also allowed us to create and pilot an online grants course, Grow Your Grants, to further meet the needs of nonprofit leaders without much grants experience.
We’ve been fortunate that the majority of our services have always been delivered remotely and that we already had a vast amount of experience facilitating virtual meetings. This has certainly made it easier to shift focus groups or large facilitated meetings that we would have preferred to hold in person to a virtual setting because we already had experience with virtual facilitation.
7. Many of our readers are considering a career as a self-employed public health consultant or entrepreneur. What is your best piece of advice for those considering or just starting out?
Well, I would not necessarily recommend to others the difficult or unusual path to business ownership that I took! However, one positive aspect of taking over an existing business or set of services – even amidst very sad circumstances – is that it meant we already had some clarity on who we were, who we served, and how we served them. My colleague Lauren and I were both very committed to continuing Pam’s legacy by doing the types of services we knew we did best for our existing clients. Although we’ve certainly tweaked and refined some of our services over the years since, having clarity around our services and embracing our niche has served us very well.
I would certainly recommend those starting out as a consultant figure out what exactly it is they do and for whom. It’s very tempting to believe you can do all things and help everyone, but the more specific you are, the better. One piece of advice is to listen carefully to what people say when they speak glowingly about working with you, as that will help you gain a better sense of what others find most valuable about your work together. Focusing on the value others have gained from your support is a great way to not only “niche down” as well as combat any insecurities or imposter syndrome you might be experiencing.
8. How can readers connect with you? Please share links to relevant websites and social media accounts:
I’d love to connect with your readers via my website, LinkedIn, or Twitter. They can also learn more about our new course on grants for health and human services nonprofits here.