A Partner in Health
By Claire Jeantheau
Only one truck per day passed through the rural community of Juan de Mena in Paraguay, where Albert Whitaker ’73 served as a volunteer in the Peace Corps. If a local resident needed intensive care—often, it was a farmer injured in a machete accident—they would have to go first to what Albert calls “makeshift doctors and nurses.” From there, quality treatment was never guaranteed.
“In order to get to a hospital, first of all, you had to have transportation. Then when you got there, you had to have finances in order to pay,” he recalls. “The access to care always frightened me.”
Informed by both cross-cultural experiences and his roots in Boston, Albert, now the Director of Community Impact at the American Heart Association, set out to understand what it really means to provide care—not just at the moment of an emergency but in every sphere of a person’s life. “To see that those that are under-resourced receive adequate and proper healthcare,” he says, “has been my charge since.”
Systemic Change
Ask Albert what’s new at the American Heart Association, and you’ll hear about cardiac health initiatives that have drawn large-scale public visibility, like Damar Hamlin’s #3forHeart Challenge, a public education campaign developed with the Buffalo Bills safety who suffered a heart attack on the football field in 2023. The challenge is helping advance a long-term goal for the organization: to train at least one person in every American household in CPR by 2030.
When Albert talks, though, his thoughts spill over into projects in a dozen areas of public health: Drafting model vape discipline policies for schools that use counseling to identify the root causes of student drug use. Teaming up with food pantries to install more refrigeration and shelving, increasing the space available for fresh produce. Developing partnerships so that patients with blood-pressure problems can instantly be referred to clinics that will assist them with next steps. And all of this as he completes a ministry doctorate after work hours, focusing on the intersection of religious faith and health. (“Those that are marginalized and don’t have that wherewithal to get quality care—how is their faith impacting that?” he wonders. “I’m still formulating all of this in my head.”)
Albert’s overarching goal for these varied initiatives is “building a clinical-community linkage,” and New England is a complex place for this work. The region covers not only East Coast hubs like Boston and Providence but also sparsely populated towns in Maine where (much like Albert’s host community in Paraguay) residents don’t have immediate access to a doctor. He must account, too, for the gaps he sees in the health system that extend beyond any one locality.
“Say someone’s living with hypertension, and the advice from the practitioner is ‘eat healthier, get physical activity,’” Albert explains. “If you live in an area that’s lacking in green spaces or affordable, healthy foods, then what’s the alternative? In most cases, we see that people…go to a McDonald’s or a Burger King, and eat from there, which is really going to have [a negative] impact on their health in the long run.”
Effective interventions, Albert insists, need to happen on two levels: “We’re working with the community in one place, where we’re providing education and ensuring that [community members] get the care, but also working with the health provider to look at not only the actual disease but the social determinants that caused that disease.”
Multidimensional Understanding
Albert’s childhood in Boston’s South End—which he fondly remembers as a “multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic, multigenerational” neighborhood—lent itself well to a career based in advocacy and communication. “There were people from various cultures—Lebanese, Chinese. We grew up together; we never had that separation,” he says. Free recreation at the Boys’ Club (now Boys & Girls Club) helped unify children across backgrounds, along with summer classes and trips to Camp Hale in New Hampshire. (Albert currently sits on the camp’s board and returns to assist with building projects.)
At Commonwealth, Albert drew from the knowledge of distinguished assembly guests (bluesman John Lee Hooker and author Alice Walker both made appearances) and Spanish teacher Aida Álvarez (who went on to lead the federal Small Business Administration). He progressed from practicing Spanish on class outings to Harvard Square restaurants to using it in Mexico during a summer with the Experiment in Intentional Living program. During his Peace Corps term after high school, Albert would also pick up Paraguay’s most common local language, Gurani, by joining card games in the local pensione (boarding house).
He returned to his neighborhood to work for the United South End Settlements, organizing guest speakers and classes on topics like Arabic, Hebrew, and art for minimal fees. His language skills helped net him an administrative position for the American Diabetes Association; the final interview was conducted entirely in Spanish. And to advance his growing professional interests in epidemiology and community outreach, he earned two master’s degrees in public health and urban ministry. Albert pauses for a moment as he recounts it all. “I did a lot!” he chuckles.
An affinity for other languages and cultures remains a key part of Albert’s life—after all, it’s one of the most important tools he has for connecting people in Community Initiatives. “In Maine, Portland has a large Somali population, and there are Portuguese and French and Arabic speakers,” he says. “We’re training those that actually speak those languages to provide hands-on CPR demonstrations. We’re doing it in multiple languages now so that we can work with other communities.”
Foot Soldiers and Health Victories
What would Albert’s hypothetical interaction—the health practitioner giving advice to a patient with hypertension—look like if a framework was in place for holistic care?
“I think it’s really important that providers, whether it’s a physician’s assistant or a nurse practitioner, are able to ask questions that are going to prompt a response so that they can get a better idea of where that individual is and then make those referrals,” Albert says. “The ideal response would be ‘Hey, guess what? We can send you down the hall to the SNAP recruiter,’” who would help identify affordable, healthy grocery options.
To know how to draw upon those resources, Albert says, practitioners need to listen to those he dubs the “foot soldiers” in each community: “the people who are really passionate about it, who have some kind of personal experience.” Examples who inspire Albert include the late Yvonne Heredia, a woman who survived cardiac arrest while living out of her car with two children, then went on to earn a doctorate and join the Board of Directors of the Rhode Island American Heart Association chapter. (When she passed away, the chapter established a Lifetime Achievement Award in her name for other champions of health awareness, particularly those working with vulnerable populations.)
In Albert’s own fights over the past year, one of the wins he’s most proud of is training clinical staff to take more accurate blood pressure readings, as well as expanding the use of those tests not only at community health centers but at local churches. He envisions a time when health services are fully integrated with day-to-day life, what he terms “one-stop care.” It would be a future where it’s commonplace to borrow a blood pressure monitor with your library books or to visit a mobile clinic in your neighborhood park for seasonal vaccines and wellness screenings.
“I’m still learning about all of the opportunities that are available and what we can offer to the community,” he says. “That, to me, is success—when I’m seeing people empowered to take control of their health, but also having organizations that are working in tandem with clinics to provide necessary care.” t
Claire Jeantheau served as Commonwealth’s Communications Coordinator before becoming the Marketing Manager for the American Exchange Project. This article originally appeared in the summer 2025 edition of CM, Commonwealth's alumni/ae magazine.