Gary Gunderson
Vice President for Faith and Health, Professor of Public Health Sciences and, (at the Divinity School) Professor of Religion and the Health of the Public, Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre and Wake Forest University School of Divinity His degrees, which hide as much as they illuminate, are an undergraduate degree from Wake Forest University in History, a Masters of Divinity at Emory University (with an honours thesis on economics, faith and the hungry) and a Doctor of Ministry from the Interdenominational Theology Centre in Atlanta (with a thesis on Boundary Leadership). However, his real qualifications are some 40 years of life in incredibly rich webs of relationships with people working seriously in the areas of hunger/poverty and community development, public health and more recently health care, all of which in the boundary zone between people moving out of their exclusive faith identities. Gary is interested in organizational and community change and how people influence complex human systems to morph in the direction of greater vitality, decency and maybe even justice. He has always been interested in what faith has to do with any of this. It has been a curious life path, but has lead through about 8 years at the Carter Centre where many of these ideas were developed, and the school of public health at Emory, then 7 years as a senior executive at Methodist LeBonheur Healthcare (a $1.5 billion faith based hospital system in Memphis, one of the poorest cities in the United States). His current work focuses on helping this large system align its full institutional and human assets with its professed goal of advancing the health of the region. |
