WITH Foundation provides financial support to organizations that promote comprehensive healthcare for adults with developmental disabilities. WITH offers at least 3 grant cycles (2 Open Cycles and 1 RFP cycle) each year. Through our RFP cycle, we typically provide $200-300K to nonprofit organizations in the United States.
During our RFP cycle, we not only receive feedback from our Self-Advocate Advisory Committee who advise on all of our grant cycles, but we also benefit from the expertise and perspectives of our Clinical Review Committee members. This year’s Clinical Review Committee members are:
Dr. Juan Espinoza (Committee Chair and WITH Board Secretary)
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Juan Espinoza, MD, is the Chief Research Informatics Officer at Lurie Children’s Hospital and Associate Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Data Science at Northwestern University. He is also the Director and Principal Investigator of the Consortium for Technology & Innovation in Pediatrics, an FDA funded pediatric medical device accelerator. His research focuses on identifying, refining, and innovating approaches to using data, media, and technology to improve health outcomes and narrow the health gap faced by marginalized communities in the US and abroad. Juan completed his undergraduate studies at Washington
University in St. Louis and earned his MD from the USC Keck School of Medicine, completing his pediatric residency at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. He was an attending physician at CHLA and faculty at USC for nearly a decade before moving to Chicago in 2023.
Dr. John Berens
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John Berens, MD is a board-certified physician in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics. He is faculty member at Baylor College of Medicine where he serves as a full-time clinician in the Transition Medicine Clinic, a primary care clinic that serves adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). His special interests include healthcare transition, interprofessional education, and addressing health disparities experienced by individuals with IDD across the lifespan. In addition to his clinical work, he volunteers with Special Olympics of Texas and is the faculty
leader for the medical student chapter of American Academy of Developmental Medicine and Dentistry. He lives in Houston, Texas with his wonderful family that includes a wife, two young children, a dog, and a cat.
Geraldine Collins-Bride, DNP
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Gerri Collins-Bride is an adult nurse practitioner and Professor Emeritus in the UCSF School of Nursing where she is on faculty and teaches in the Adult Gerontology Primary Care Nurse Practitioner program. For over 35 years she has been practicing in General Internal Medicine at UCSF as a primary care provider for adults with developmental and psychiatric disabilities. She is a member of the Redwood Coast Regional Center Telemedicine “TACT” team, and for the past twenty years co-chaired the annual CME course on “Developmental Disabilities: An Update for Health Professionals” with her partner, Dr. Lucy Crain. For the past 28 years, Gerri has been the Clinical Director of a faculty practice that she developed providing primary care for individuals with serious mental illness in community mental health residential treatment programs. This practice, Interprofessional Primary Care Outreach for People with Mental Illness (IPCOM), has trained hundreds of students to provide respectful care for people with mental illness.
Dr. Marie Flores
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Dr. Marie Flores (she, her, ella) is a family medicine physician at Altamed in Pico Rivera, CA and also an epidemiologist and assistant researcher in the Department of Epidemiology at UCLA. She went to undergraduate at Davidson College, majoring in Spanish, got her masters and PhD in epidemiology at the UCLA School of Public Health, and went to medical school at the University of Utah. She completed her residency at the social medicine program at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, New York. Her professional interests include primary care in medically underserved communities, reproductive health and justice, and public health research in Latino populations. She currently lives in the Los Angeles area with her husband, son, and two dogs, and was featured in the 2021 LA Times article about pregnancy and disability that appeared on the front page of the Sunday paper.
Nicholas Gagner, DMD
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Nick Gagner is a dentist currently serving as the clinical director and team lead for the Denver Health Westside Family Health Center Dental Clinic. He is also a clinical instructor for the University of Colorado School of Dental Medicine. Prior to this role, he served as assistant dental director for another large non-profit community health center in Colorado, and also had a private practice that served patients with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Nick serves as a Clinical Director for Special Olympics Colorado and is a board member for the Special Care Dental Association – Academy of Dentistry for People with Disabilities. He is the proud parent of 3 daughters, one of whom has Down Syndrome.
Veronica Tess Myers
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Veronica Tess Myers is a stay-at-home mother, autism activist, advocate, strategist, and community mobilizer. Veronica is a first-generation double alum college graduate with a Master of Arts degree in Applied Communication Studies from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Veronica’s most fulfilling accomplishment is caring for her autistic son and sharing the challenges faced when having to engage with taxpayer-funded agencies that are financially exploited by those in political authority. They do so by way of their non-profit. The name of their organization is Alexander’s Secret, Inc., a 501(c)(3) launched in May 2011 after Alexander’s high school graduation. Veronica says they are proactive in providing assistance to parents and families who deal with autism spectrum disorder and the inconsistencies faced in meeting their child’s educational and community-based needs. The organization is dedicated to providing customized opportunities and resources to improve the success of the transition process of life after high school for children and young adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and the training and community education necessary to accomplish this goal. They also provide awareness about community inequities experienced during the education and community inclusion process. Additionally, they help families understand and navigate the complex system of public schools, waiver home and community-based services, and the laws that govern them. Veronica says her goal is to bring power to the truth, and in doing so she has to speak that truth to those who hold the power. “This is not a journey for the passive who hide in the fear of political retaliation behind the greed of money in politics. This journey is for those who find it their duty to speak up for the rights of the most vulnerable in our society. This journey requires an insurmountable level of fierceness, and I have been and will continue to be up for the task at hand for as long as it takes for there to be AUTISM INCLUSION, AUTISM ACCEPTANCE, AND AUTISM EMPOWERMENT in its true form,” she says.
Dr. Judith Stych
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Throughout her nursing career, Dr. Judith Stych has specialized in supporting individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) across the lifespan. Her experience includes positions as coordinator of multidisciplinary ambulatory clinics for children with cerebral palsy and seizure disorders, community-based case manager for adults with IDD, and nurse clinician, nurse supervisor, and lead coordinator and instructor of a certified nursing assistant instructional program in an ICF/IDD for children, adolescents, and adults. A Certified Developmental Disabilities Nurse (CDDN) since 2005, Dr. Stych served as the Developmental Disabilities Nurses Association (DDNA) Vice-President from 2010-2013, President-elect from 2018-2020, and is currently President. For 11 years, she served as the volunteer Clinical Director for the Special Olympics Wisconsin Healthy Athletes Health Promotion program. Dr. Stych holds a DNP in Advanced Public Health Nursing from Rush University, Chicago, Illinois and is a member of Sigma Theta Tau. She is a nurse consultant for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services within its Medicaid waiver managed care program for frail elders and people with physical and/or intellectual/developmental disabilities.
We look forward to announcing the projects supported through our most recent RFP that focused on projects supporting healthcare equity in communities of color for older adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. WITH Foundation released this RFP in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
If you are a clinician with experience in serving adults with I/DD (including clinicians with disabilities) and are interested in serving on our next iteration of the Clinical Review Committee, please check back in late April when the application and additional information will be available.
Thank you to both our Self-Advocate Advisory Committee and our Clinical Review Committee! Learn more about our Self-Advocate Advisory Committee, or apply to join the Committee!