2012 Honorary Event Chairs

Yi sehak Tu r a, RN BSN, PHN
DS MA EOT C Parish Nursing Program Coordinator

He is the founder of the Debre Selam Medhane Alem Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church Parish Nursing Program. This program provides health screening, health education and referral services for our community members. He leads the program and coordinates volunteers and professionals from the community to provide free services. The program collaborates with Minnesota Department of Health Refugee Health Program and different organizations to provide preventative and public health services. They have held five health fairs in the past five years, hosted three flu shot clinics in the last three seasons. They also have office hours after Sunday church program providing blood pressure, glucose and cholesterol screening and personal health consultation. He was chosen by Metropolitan State University as one of 40 Alumni Who’ve Made a Difference in 2011.

Wilhelmina Holder, MD CM, DTPH, MS

Executive Director, Women’s Initiative for Self Empowerment

Dr. Wilhelmina Holder, an immigrant from Liberia, is a graduate of McGill Medical School, Canada, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, England.  She emigrated to Minnesota, USA, in 1985 through Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship Program, after suffering severe political prosecution secondary to the Liberian coup d’état in 1980 at which time President  of Liberia, William R. Tolbert, her father, was assassinated.

She had international and national experience in program and organizational management and evaluation in Liberia, for eight years, practicing preventive medicine or directing various disease prevention and control programs for women and children.

In Minnesota, she obtained a Masters in Epidemiology at the University of Minnesota. Since 1990, she worked in several Twin Cities’ community-based non-profit Organizations planning, directing and evaluating educational and health related services

targeting the most vulnerable minority populations: youth, prostitutes, drug users, abused children, juvenile delinquents and immigrants/refugees. Presently, she is the Executive Director of the Women’s Initiative for Self Empowerment (WISE), Inc. that empowers immigrant women/girls to succeed in the Twin Cities and Metropolitan Areas.  She is a Christian and has been supported by husband of a thirty-eight years and four qualified children (a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor and an artist), with seven grandchildren.

Mohammed Meran

Fatuma Elmi