Meet Monique Fountain-Hanna: BUILD Initiative’s Newest Staff Member

The BUILD Initiative is thrilled to welcome Monique Fountain Hanna, MD, MPH, MBA, to our staff as Interim Director of State Services. Monique has over 23 years of experience transforming public health systems; driving health equity; overseeing the development of infant, maternal, and child health-serving systems; and advancing quality standards across the country.

Among other roles, she has served as US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps Officer, Chief Medical Officer and CQI/Health Equity Advisor for the US Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV), and the HRSA MIECHV and Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems Region Ill Project Officer/Senior Regional Medical Consultant. We are humbled by Monique’s depth of experience and excited to work with her, especially at this crucial time.

We recently spoke to Monique about her passion for ensuring equitable outcomes for children and families. She shared some of her many accomplishments, the role she will play in helping to move BUILD and its mission forward, and her thoughts on how leaders and organizations should reconsider their leadership approaches in these times.

An Early Grounding in Equity

Monique’s commitment to healthy equity took root in her earliest years, as the child of a nurse. The administrator of a long-term “care hospital for children with chronic disease, Monique’s mother oversaw the care of one of its few Black patients, a young girl who received very few visitors and who never had the opportunity to leave the hospital. Monique remembers spending hours in that room near the nurses’ station, providing company to this child whose life seemed a portrait of undue misfortune. Though Monique’s mother and the other nurses provided the girl with loving, expert care, Monique became motivated by the missed opportunity this child seemed to experience through her circumstances. Monique eventually went on to attend medical school and found her way to pediatrics and then to preventive medicine, where she aimed to have the biggest impact possible on behalf of marginalized families and children.

Included among the many highlights of Monique’s long and impressive resume is her management of a $7M five-year quality improvement investment in the maternal, infant, and early childhood home visiting program. In that role she supported states and territories in their implementation and utilization of CQI tools and resources aimed at closing gaps to meet improvement benchmarks across various areas, from maternal depression and intimate partner violence to well child care and health equity. She also oversaw a $28M project for home visiting innovation awardees in 14 states that provided a chance to look beyond evidence-based models to find opportunities for innovations that could address the specific needs of those states and the communities they were serving.

Expertise to Help Move BUILD and Its Mission Forward

Monique is excited about the opportunity to work alongside leaders in the field, including BUILD team members themselves. She said she looks forward to adding her skills and expertise to BUILD’s “all-star team” as BUILD seeks strategic opportunities to move the organization forward and “determine how we hold true to who we are in unprecedented times.” Her focus is on “who we’ve been, who we are right now, and where we want to be” so that we can “forge ahead and continue to be the beacon that addresses the deep needs of states around early childhood systems,” homing in on “racial equity as a core value of systems building.”

Leading Amidst New and Familiar Challenges

As a participant in various leadership programs, including BUILD’s Equity Leaders Action Network (ELAN), Monique has been drawn to the idea of adaptive leadership, which requires that leaders be “nimble and responsive to current opportunities and challenges what they did in the past.” She thinks this is especially true in these extraordinary times. However, she also underscored that:

The families and communities that we serve have been dealing with unprecedented times for their entire life. They have learned how to make things happen when there are limited or no resources, when nobody says their name, when all the doors are closed.

Our system has not worked for far too many people in the past and even today, but we keep trying to retrofit it to make it work. We keep trying to add band-aids to cover gaping wounds. Unfortunately, those who are most vulnerable are the ones who need us to ensure their voices are heard and they are sitting at the table with us during these unprecedented times.

How do we Move on from Here?

Monique spoke about how we can go about buffering the most vulnerable and the role leaders must play:

We are at a moment in which we can choose to collaborate with families and communities in a much more intentional way. We need to ask what we want the next five or 10 years to look like as we encounter opportunities to potentially rebuild a system we know hasn’t benefitted everyone equally. How do we intentionally have folks who are the beneficiaries of services sitting at the table with us? How do we design a new system or new way of doing things that center the collective and individual needs of every family, including those who sit the furthest from resources? What we need right now are leaders who are courageous, leaders who are willing to innovate and strategize for a better future for young children, their families, and communities.

A Shifting Focus to Build Upon

Monique is embracing the ground-level coalition building that is occurring in the face of the upheaval that has taken hold across the country.

“Before, everyone was in competition for funds, but those resources have now grown scarce at every level. At this moment, we need to look to the places where we build larger coalitions and intentional collaborations. The energy right now is coming from communities, and we need to support them and learn from that. A past presidential campaign used a slogan that simply said, ‘We are stronger together.’ I believe that’s our path forward.“