[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 4 (Wednesday, January 9, 2019)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E24-E25]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      THE PASSING OF LORETTA JONES

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. KAREN BASS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                       Wednesday, January 9, 2019

  Ms. BASS. Madam Speaker, I would like to honor the life and memory of 
a pioneer in the field of health policy, my long-time friend, colleague 
and fellow organizer, Dr. Loretta Jones, who passed away on November 
22.
  She was a founding member of the Community Coalition for substance 
abuse Prevention and Treatment. In fact, she was the first staff person 
hired and developed the Coalition's Prevention Network. That network 
brought together social service providers from South LA to address 
substance abuse in the community.
  Loretta had a towering passion for justice and a caregiver's 
attention to detail. She founded Healthy African American Families 
(HAAF) in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising to engage 
universities, think tanks, and community members together to seek 
solutions to longstanding health problems, including the scourge of 
pre-term births in the African American community. For this work she 
received two honorary doctorates and, last year, she received the UCLA 
Medal, the university's highest honor, for her career of working to 
address inequalities in health and health outcomes.
  She is best known for co-developing methods that give underserved 
communities a greater role in planning and implementing academic 
research. Community-Partnered Participatory Research (CPPR) calls for 
transparency, accountability and equal power-sharing between academics 
and communities. In 2007, with UCLA professor Kenneth Wells, she 
published the CCPR model in the Journal of the American Medical 
Association.
  In doing so, she demonstrated another tenet of CPPR--that community 
members co-author research publications alongside academics.

[[Page E25]]

Loretta had that rare ability to serve as a bridge between the worlds 
of policy and research, and the everyday lives of the people she cared 
about most. She mentored hundreds of physicians, nurses, public health 
practitioners, social scientists and community members to do the same. 
Those people went on to become tenured faculty members at medical 
schools, state officials and senior advisers in Congress and the White 
House.
  A native of Massachusetts, she earned a BA in psychology in 1963 and 
Master's degree in criminal justice in 1972, both from Northeastern 
University in Boston. She had been a community faculty member at 
Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science since 2010. A former 
foster youth herself, she fostered 20 children in addition to raising 
her daughter. She made a real difference in the world during her 77 
years.
  Loretta always insisted that ``Everyone deserves the right to live, 
everyone deserves good health care, and we are all responsible for 
making it happen.'' I mourn her passing with all of those who loved 
her. I am grateful for her compassion, her dedication, and the work to 
which she dedicated her life: to empower families to lead truly healthy 
lives.

                          ____________________