Build/Share Power

Cindy McDannold joined the Missouri Primary Care Association in October 2020 as a member of the Missouri Center for Healthcare Quality Team. She serves as the Behavioral Health and Substance Use Disorder Program Manager. In this role, Cindy facilitates training and technical assistance with health centers and partners regarding integration of behavioral health and substance use disorder treatment, with an emphasis on medications for opioid use disorder. She holds a master’s degree in counseling and has over 17 years of experience in community-based health; including behavioral health services, quality improvement, and implementation of integrated healthcare.

Jamie Rodriguez is an attorney from Joplin, Missouri. Shortly after law school graduation, her hometown was devastated by a tornado. She returned home to help with response and recovery as an Equal Justice Works Legal Fellow, representing low-income individuals impacted by the disaster. The experience showed her how legal representation is an essential tool for people in crisis, whether the crisis is an F5 tornado or merely living every day in poverty. She now works at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri helping low-income Missourians gain access to healthcare and essential nutritional supports like food stamps. In addition to direct client representation, she engages in both administrative advocacy and litigation.

Matthew Huffman is a public health advocate and enthusiast from northeast Arkansas, but after 13 years, he now considers Missouri home. Matthew has a degree in Media and Cultural Studies with a minor in Sociology from the University of Missouri-Columbia. While in college, Matthew worked at the MU Women’s Center, developing outreach programming on sexual and reproductive health. Now, he works as the Chief Public Affairs Officer at Missouri Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence (MOCADSV). Matthew is passionate about the mission of MOCADSV and even turned down his Peace Corps placement 7 years ago to begin working at the Coalition.

Amanda Schneider grew up in a small town in Indiana. Early on, she saw becoming a lawyer as a way to make a better life for herself and her family. It wasn’t until later, during her time studying at Indiana University - Bloomington, that she realized her role as a lawyer (and her role in the world) was to change the conditions of people impacted by systems of oppression. Her own experiences, including witnessing her nephew attempt to navigate the educational system at the intersection of race and disability, and an evolving racial equity lens guide her work at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri as a community lawyer, where she works toward educational equity. She continues to be persistent in finding ways to effectuate change in the educational systems in St. Louis City and County and state-wide even though it can be incremental.

Nichole Murphy is from Edgewood, Maryland (Baltimore-side). She originally came to St. Louis to attend Washington University for architecture. As part of a community that experiences systemic oppression and injustice, she was drawn to studying our history and the conditions of how we got here that she felt were more relevant to her life and that would lead to some change. When she graduated in May 2014 and was away from St. Louis at the time of Michael Brown’s murder, she realized St. Louis was home. She returned to St. Louis to pursue her Master’s in Social Work in 2016 and began working with The Ville neighborhood. In her current role with Forward through Ferguson, she strives for a model of community engagement that builds community ownership after initially building connections among community members.

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