Florida transplant to take helm at Partnership for Public Health

LACONIA — Tamera Carmichael was supposed to come to New Hampshire to pursue a state job. After all, she had worked for most of her career with Florida’s Department of Public Health. Before she could land the job, though, Gov. Sununu declared a hiring freeze due to the coronavirus pandemic. That’s how she came to be the new executive director for the Partnership for Public Health, which is headquartered on Water Street.

Carmichael is succeeding Shelley Carita, who has led the organization for the past three-and-a-half years.

Though she spent her adult years in the Sunshine State, Carmichael is a native of the Midwest.

“I grew up on a farm in a small town in Ohio,” she said, and, had she stayed there, she thinks her life would have taken a much different route. In that small town where she lived until her senior year of high school, “college was not a path that you talked about a lot.”

Before she could graduate from high school, though, her family moved to Clearwater, Florida, which she said was “a big culture shock.” It also shocked her perspective of possibilities, though, because by the time she finished her senior year, she had a full scholarship to a local community college. From there, she transferred to the University of Southern Florida.

“I found my passion in college,” Carmichael said. She began her college studies as an art major, but changed course when she took a sociology class. “Helping people and communities, that is where my heart is,” she said.

Carmichael was able to put that passion to work with the State of Florida, and built a life in Gainesville, a city of about 130,000 and home to the University of Forida. She raised her son there, and when he recently graduated from university, the two of them decided it was time for a change. She was at the highest rung of her state career ladder she could be without moving to Tallahasee, and her son was interested in a change of scenery.

Informing their decision was a vacation they took to New England last year. “We just fell in love with it,” Carmichael said. They both appreciated the region’s landscape, history and rural charms, and her son, who is interested in politics, was especially interested in New Hampshire’s role in the presidential nominating process.

Carmichael and her son, as well as her parents, made the move at the tail end of winter and have been acclimating to their new home, getting to know the local landscape and cataloguing all of the wildlife they’ve seen.

Carmichael said she “didn’t plan on a pandemic” when she decided to move to New Hampshire. The novel coronavirus pandemic both heightens interest in public health, and makes it harder to do work in that field.

“The main challenge is reopening our community and being as safe as possible in doing that,” Carmichael said. The Partnership for Public Health, an independent organization that is funded through state grants, is providing education, guidance and direction for community partners, and also trying to figure out how PPH can continue to do its work in the new landscape.

“We definitely need to be creative going forward,” Carmichael said. Teleconference technology makes it possible to meet with colleagues to continue planning, but Zoom doesn’t work as a health delivery vehicle.

“As our stay-in-place orders change, how are we going to implement these strategies, that is going to be our biggest challenge, I think,” she said. For example, the organization helps promote community resistance to seasonal influenza by offering flu shots at local schools. How will that work if schools are held remotely next fall?

“We would need to be creative and have a Plan B with how we’re going to do the flu vaccine in the fall,” Carmichael said.

While she ponders that question, she said she’s been impressed with her new home’s sense of community.

“It’s exciting, I can’t wait to be a part of it and continue it on the history that it has,” Carmichael said.

Her predecessor, Carita, is leaving the Partnership for Public Health in order to pursue consulting and advocacy. She said she enjoyed her time leading the organization.

“It is an amazing organization with an outstanding team of smart, dedicated and compassionate people including staff and Board,” Carita said. “ I have learned so much about our region’s public health system over the last 3 ½ years and am planning to use all of this knowledge as I continue to advocate for community health improvement as an elected official. I’m running for a seat in the NH House of Representatives representing Meredith and Gilford in District 2.”