Each of the four activists that we are highlighting this year share a fundamental understanding that single-payer and health justice are inextricably interlinked with every aspect of our lives. 

Though they come to this work with different experiences and through different areas of focus, they each hold an informed analysis of the intersections of health justice and the societal struggles we face including racial justice, housing, employment, immigration, disability, aging, HIV, drug use, harm reduction, police violence, incarceration, birth justice, food security, environmental justice, and economic equity.

In their organizing, each champions single-payer as one of the foundational, indispensable steps towards creating a just healthcare system & society that puts people over profits and serves everyone’s needs.

With community champions like these working together with us, the struggle for guaranteed, universal, single-payer health care for all of us is is stronger than ever.

Katy Cecen

Katy is a doula, trained midwife & nurse who worked in the NICU of a State run, segregated Black & intentionally underfunded hospital in Brooklyn, NY from 2014-2019. She started the campaign #Equity4Downstate which was instrumental in securing an additional $50 million in funding for the hospital in the 2020-2021 NY State Budget. She is now a full-time activist, organizing birth workers and birthing & birthed  people to work on legislation addressing medical racism and misogyny and hopes to help build a movement for birth liberation. 

Tweet about Katy at our gala

Ilana Berger

Ilana is the New York Director of Hand In Hand (a national network of employers of nannies, housecleaners and home attendants working for dignified and respectful working conditions; & a sister organization to the National Domestic Workers Alliance) and Co-Director of The New York Caring Majority (a movement of seniors, people with disabilities, family caregivers, and domestic and home care workers from all across the state). She has been organizing since 1996 in community-based organizations in New York, Miami, San Francisco, including ten years as co-founder and Executive Director of Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE) in Brooklyn.  After leaving FUREE, Ilana was Co-Director of the New Bottom Line, a national campaign bank accountability campaign uniting four national organizing networks. Ilana has consulted for local and national organizations including the Ford Foundation, National People's Action, Teachers Unite, the North Star Fund, the Center for Community Change, the Center for Popular Democracy, Citizen Action of NY and Health GAP. Ilana has two daughters and lives in Kingston, NY.

"This April, my amazing grandmother died at the age of 108. For the last 4 years, after she suffered a stroke at 104, home health aides made it possible for her to live in her own apartment and maintain a high quality of life. ALL people deserve the skilled and loving care she received, and when we win the NY Health Act, with long-term care included, all New Yorkers WILL receive that care."

Jawanza James Williams

Jawanza is a Black, radical Queer, Prison Abolitionist, Socialist, Community Organizer. He is a native of Beaumont, Texas. After he received a BA in English from Schreiner University in 2012, he moved to New York City, where he now works with the political organization Voices of Community Activists and Leaders (VOCAL-NY) as the Director of Organizing. Williams is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and a founding member of its Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus.

Tweet about Jawanza at our gala

Naomi Zewde

Naomi is chair of the Healthcare Committee of Grassroots Action NY, as well as assistant professor in health policy and management at the CUNY School of Public Health in the city of New York. She studies how public policies can reduce inequality in health insurance and in wealth. Naomi is also a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and formerly a post-doctoral research scientist at the Columbia University School of Social Work, in the Center on Poverty and Social Policy.

"Single payer healthcare means no deductibles, no co-pays, and no narrow networks. It means the care we need, instead of the paperwork we don’t."

Tweet with a link to Naomi's 60-second talk at our gala about why single-payer matters

Donald Moore, M.D.

Dr. Donald Moore is a practicing primary care physician in Brooklyn.  He was born in Jamaica and emigrated to New York City when he was 14.  He earned his MD and Masters in Public Health at Yale and did a residency in Emergency Medicine. He viewed medicine as a “calling” and his practice as a “service to the community.”  He joined the Kings County Medical Society, the county branch of the American Medical Association, and was elected president.  In 2010, he bravely invited me to speak on single payer reform to the society’s Board. He soon joined the Board of the New York Metro chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program.  Recently, he has become President of the Provident Clinical Society, the Brooklyn affiliate of the National Medical Association.  Just this year, that Society and our PNHP chapter co-sponsored a Forum on Racism in Medicine at Downstate. Wherever he goes professionally, he continually educates about the importance of passing single-payer healthcare.

Having treated many patients with COVID-19, Dr. Moore organized a team of public health experts to assess the government’s response to the pandemic.  Their report was featured on an October TV broadcast sponsored by Congressmember Yvette Clark.

Dr. Donald Moore is a physician who acts on the principle that healthcare is a human right and that single payer is a crucial step in guaranteeing access to health care for all. 

“The system we have is broken. It doesn’t work for me as a doctor – I can’t get access to my patients – and it doesn’t work for me as a patient – I can’t get access to the doctors or hospitals I want."

Tweet from the gala about honoring Donald

Writings on single-payer and COVID-19

Rachel Madley

Rachel Madley is a rising star in the Single Payer Movement.  As a PhD candidate in biomedical science at Columbia University, she believes that healthcare should be a humanitarian effort, and sees single payer as the best way to reform our broken system. 

Rachel has been an executive board member of Students for a National Health Program (or SNaHP),  and a board member of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP-NY Metro), and has promoted the single payer movement by developing new SNaHP chapters across the country. Last year as she was a PNHP - New York Metro student fellow, she  and worked with 9 student chapters to organize for single payer, and helped coordinate the first-ever Virtual Lobby Day for the New York Health Act. I have had the honor to work alongside Rachel in SNaHP, and am amazed at her commitment to doing the small and big things to push our movement forward. Once COVID hit, she developed a powerful presentation demonstrating a superior response to the pandemic by single payer systems, and presented it nationwide.  Last fall, she  wrote a hard-hitting opinion piece in the NY Times entitled “Does anyone really love their private health insurance”?  where she describes her experience with our fragmented system when hospitalized with diabetes.

PNHP – NY Metro is proud to honor Rachel for her accomplishments & the promising future she will clearly bring to the single-payer movement.

Writings by Rachel and others she recommends on single-payer

Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent news program airing on over 1,400 public TV and radio stations worldwide. Democracy Now! was launched in 1996 by the listener-sponsored, peace-and-justice Pacifica Radio Network that accepts no corporate funding, and Amy has maintained that principle since going out on her own.  She has co-authored six New York Times bestsellers and has received numerous awards for her journalism.

Democracy Now, which Amy cohosts with accomplished Latinx journalist Juan Gonzalez, has often spotlighted the abuses and gaps in the private health insurance system and the structural racism of healthcare delivery. Amy has long offered a platform for grassroots advocates of universal, single-payer healthcare, including leaders of our national organization, Physicians for a National Health Program. As Amy has written about Medicare for All, "When the people lead, the saying goes, the leaders will follow. It’s a matter of life and death."

Amy began her journalistic career at Pacifica’s New York City radio station WBAI (99.5 FM), where she started as News Director. In 1992 she became morning show cohost with Black community advocate Bernard White, Amy was always open to program ideas about AIDS activism and other social justice topics. Like her cohost Bernard, Amy always prioritized community voices -- especially LGBTQ, Black and Latinx voices -- who were challenging and resisting the institutions that disregarded the survival needs of excluded and suppressed communities. Today, as she diligently covers another pandemic with massive, avoidable suffering, Amy again centers the voices of the communities forced to endure the worst toll of systemic racism. And she continues to host academics and activists who insist that only healthcare for all will truly protect public health.

Tweet from the gala with a quote from Amy

Interviews and writings by Amy on single-payer

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Single-payer healthcare is gaining momentum like never before thanks to grassroots organizing that is bringing attention to increasing inequities in healthcare.

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