2014 Public Health Award Sheroe

Canon Diane Porter is a member of The interfaith Medical Center Board of Trustees. She is also the President of the IM Foundation. She was an active, and very vocal member, of what was called the Brooklyn Health Working Group — people sitting around the table trying to rationalize a merger between Interfaith and The Brooklyn Hospital Center. As a very reluctant participant in this group, CPHS staff greatly appreciated Canon Porter’s “take on the situation.“ Although many others took credit for the funding and production of the Community Health Needs Assessment, it was Canon Porter who recommended this be done and put money on the table, which was then matched by Brooklyn Hospital and The State Health Department. This was a first, and although The assessment did not turn out the way that CPHS hoped, the very doing of the needs assessment was a milestone.

Canon Porter has a long history of activism within organizations and communities. As the Senior VP for the Episcopal Church’s national headquarters, her portfolio included the advocacy, witness and justice ministries. As such, she was often found in all the “hot spots“ around the globe — the Middle East and Palestine, South Africa, Haiti, Nicaragua, the Front Line States. Canon Porter says they are practically all the places where no sensible person would visit.

She became an advocate for the AI Ahli Arab Hospital in the Gaza Strip —a facility of the Episcopal/Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem that provided health care under the most impossible of situations to the neediest – clearly a place where Advocacy, Witness and Justice was needed.

Simultaneously, the Chair of the Board of St. John’s Episcopal Hospital in Brooklyn asked Canon Porter if she would be willing to do some volunteer work in the Neo-Natal Unit with low birth weight babies, many of whom had become drug addicted in utero: and many of these children became abandoned. She did volunteer work as time and travel permitted. Each time she visited St. John’s, she came away thinking this clearly is the place where Advocacy, Witness and Justice are needed.

The health needs of the people in The Gaza Strip and the health needs in Central Brooklyn were essentially all the same — the difference – geography. The issues were the same — under capitalization, government indifference, difficult supply chain, adverse street life.

That’s how it began. For 30 years, Canon Porter has sought to be an advocate for the health needs of the people of Central Brooklyn and Interfaith Hospital, to bear witness to those needs and to do justice. Her Baptismal Covenant, that she reaffirms annually, requires that she strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being.  And…  just like in the Gaza Strip — the need remains in Central Brooklyn. At a very crucial point in the struggle to save Interfaith Hospital in this round, Canon Porter intervened with funding for a consultant to droll an alternative plan to the one approved by the Interfaith Board of Trustees — to close the hospital, giving in to the State Health Department’s demands. The alternative plan developed stopped the closing clock for long enough to allow stepped up community and labor mobilization in a coalition to save the hospital.