About Us

Public Health Partners is a woman-owned consulting firm based in Maine and serving clients throughout the United States since 2008. Our diverse team can assist you with any stage of your project–from assessment and design to implementation and evaluation.

Our Core Values

Respect

We treat our team members, clients, and partners respectfully. It’s at the core of all our interactions. We work best with those organizations that value respectful exchanges as well.

Equity

We know that structural, social, political, and commercial factors result in some people being more adversely impacted by health issues than others. We strive to address the root causes of inequities in all we do.

Integrity

We are honest and operate with strong moral principles and ethics. We are reliable, and if something goes wrong, we take accountability. We make sure team members get the recognition they deserve when interacting with clients.

Excellence

We strive to exceed client expectations through strong project management, open and honest communication, and evidence-based methods.

Partnership

It’s in our name! We use a community-based participatory approach, which means we enter into a partnership with our clients and access both teams’ skills and experience to benefit our work. We also engage external consultants to ensure that our team has the specific skills needed for each specific project.

Meet Our Team

Rebecca Drewette-Card, DrPH, President

Rebecca Drewette-Card, DrPH, MSPH is the President of Public Health Partners. She has nearly 25 years of experience planning, implementing, and evaluating public health initiatives. Her public health career has taken her around the country, but she has lived in Maine since 2004.

At PHP, Rebecca has assisted national organizations, state health departments, and small nonprofits to reach their programmatic goals. Before consulting, Rebecca worked in state health departments in New Mexico, Oregon, North Carolina, and Maine, and as a fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Rebecca’s career has given her both breadth and depth of experience, which has provided her with opportunities to develop a wide range of public health skills including strategic and program planning, project management, evaluation, social marketing, report-writing, intervention development, coalition-building, training development, and public speaking.

Rebecca is an adjunct faculty member at Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota, the University of Southern Maine, and the University of New England; she has taught courses on program planning, evaluation, community-based participatory research, social and behavioral health, and population health improvement. She received her Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) at Boston University, where her dissertation was titled Strategic Planning to Improve the Physical Activity Behaviors of Rural Adolescents in Maine. She earned her Master of Science in Public Health (MSPH) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was honored for her scholarly excellence with induction into Delta Omega, the national public health honor society, and her Bachelor of Arts (BA) from Gettysburg College.

Find Rebecca on LinkedIn here.

Randy Schwartz, MSPH, Senior Advisor

Randy Schwartz, MSPH is Public Health Partners’ Senior Advisor. Randy is a nationally recognized public health professional with over thirty-five years’ experience in implementing health promotion/disease prevention initiatives in state health department and voluntary health organizations. Previously Randy served as Senior Vice President, Health Systems at the American Cancer Society national Cancer Control Department. In this position, he was responsible for providing leadership in the development, implementation, and evaluation of organizational strategy for cancer control/public health systems policy and practice initiatives. Prior to that, he served as Vice President for Health Systems for the American Cancer Society, New England Division. Randy served as Director of the Division of Community and Family Health of the Maine Bureau of Health (now Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention) for fifteen years. In that role, he directed all chronic disease prevention and control and health promotion programs (e.g., cancer control, cardiovascular disease prevention, tobacco prevention and control, and community health promotion), as well as the maternal and child health and public health nursing programs.

Randy has authored or co-authored numerous articles on health promotion and chronic disease prevention. He is the Founding Editor of the journal, Health Promotion Practice, a journal of the Society for Public Health Education. He has been awarded the Society for Public Health Education’s Distinguished Fellow Award, the Society’s highest honor. He has a Master of Science in Public Health from the University of Massachusetts.

Tonya Nash, MPH, CHES®, Project Manager

Tonya Nash​ is Public Health Partners’ Project Manager. She has responsibility for writing digital and print content for our clients. Tonya is the founder of the Autism Faith Network, an initiative which equips places of worship to serve persons with autism and their families. Her professional experience also includes working as a Health Education Program Manager for a health system, as a health coach for a health and wellness institute, and as a freelance writer of articles focused on the health of military families. She has also served as the Communications Committee Chair for the Society for Public Health Education, and as the Social Media Content Manager for the American Public Health Association. Tonya has a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a certificate in Digital Health Communication from Tufts University. Additionally, she holds a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Sociology from Fayetteville State University.

Timnit Berhane, MPH, Research Assistant

Timnit Berhane is a Research Assistant at Public Health Partners. Timnit has engaged in health advocacy and education for populations in the country of Eritrea and the Appalachian Region of the United States. She has completed rural public health research on diabetes and prediabetes, as well as HIV and AIDS. She has a Master of Public Health (MPH) from Ohio University and a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Applied Biology from the Eritrea Institute of Technology.

Alexis Ellsworth-Kopkowski, , PhD, MA, Research Assistant

Domonique M. Wilkins, MBA, Business Manager