Healing Through Leadership

Nurse. Advocate. Community Healer.

Angela Gray’s West Virginia community is more than just her home — it’s her people. The public health department nursing director has always considered lifting up others in her community as part of her duty, especially amid an opioid epidemic. Seeing others suffer, Angela began working hard to reduce self-harm in the community.

Then, Angela won a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation which provided access to a 2-year CCL program. The experience, with its emphasis in empathetic listening and digging deeply into behavior, completely changed her perspective. The second year focused on a specific project through which Angela created a new harm reduction/syringe exchange program that’s already proving to be effective. For Angela, this isn’t just a job. It’s a lifetime commitment to the place and people she loves.