If there’s such a thing as a pedigree in community outreach, Dorii Gbolo certainly has one. Her grandmother was the first African-American nurse in her hometown of Danville, Ill., in the 1940s, and her mother followed suit by becoming the first black student admitted to the local hospital’s nursing school.
“Social justice has always been a part of my life,” Gbolo says. “My parents took active roles in the community and in the Civil Rights movement, so as I pursued college, marriage, and motherhood, those things were always there at the forefront.”
In the 1970s and 1980s, Gbolo traveled to Liberia twice as a missionary. The experiences had a profound effect on her. When she returned in 1990, she enrolled in the nursing program at the College of St. Catherine so she could prepare for further mission work. Open Cities hired the new graduate as a nurse manager.
Once there, Gbolo began to notice the health disparities in the patients’ experiences. Open Cities was primarily a family practice clinic, so it was in the habit of referring patients to other providers for more specialized care. But the patients, who were primarily African Americans or immigrants, sometimes wouldn’t follow through with their referrals. When they did go to a specialist, they’d often return with horror stories of how they were treated—or how they perceived that they were treated.
At that time, the Federal Government launched the Health Disparities Collaboratives to empower community clinics to treat patients with diabetes, cardiovascular disease, depression, and other chronic health problems. So Gbolo spoke with the then-CEO of Open Cities and said she’d like to provide more far-reaching care.
“In all these things, you can’t just treat one body part,” she says. “You have to treat the whole human being, and have all those services in one facility. If you’re diabetic or depressed, for example, it messes with your teeth. So this is convenient for our patients.”
Gbolo quickly gained a reputation for getting things done—not least because she was accomplishing these advances in community outreach while raising 11 children of her own. After a stint at the Minnesota Department of Health, she was named interim CEO, then permanent CEO, of Open Cities Health Center. She wants to further increase the reach of the clinic by adding chiropractic, herbal treatments, acupuncture, and massage therapy, all of which are sought after by the immigrant populations served by the clinic.
“We’re a Federally Qualified Health Center, so we’re the so-called safety net for the folks who don’t have insurance,” she says.
Gbolo is currently mentoring two young women, and she has advice for others who might wish to follow in her footsteps.
“Many times we let barriers stop us in our tracks,” she says. “We have to go around them and keep on walking. There are a lot of people that are cheering for you to be successful.”
