Nurse Practitioners are at the heart and soul of community health centers. Lyssa J- NP is an amazing example of passion and dedication in serving low income women and children in her Bay Area Planned Parenthood health center. Lyssa felt her calling to work with vulnerable populations while in high school. As she began to understand that whole segments of our communities lacked basic rights because of their skin color, sexuality, or socio-economic status, she wanted to be an attorney for the ACLU. She went to college at UC Santa Cruz, to study politics and after graduation moved to Israel. When language barriers prevented Lyssa from attending law school in Israel, she started a career in business development, helping a small technology start-up grow into a publicly traded company. As her company grew, she became disillusioned by the corporate focus of profits over people. Her calling to work on creating equitable communities re-emerged and Lyssa started on a journey to find where she would be impactful. She started traveling in Asia and her career as a NP truly began while volunteering in India working with some of the most extreme poverty on the planet. She worked with a medical aid organization providing health care to women and children who often walked over 20 miles to receive care. She knew then that she was going to become a nurse practitioner whose focus was women’s health. Having majored in politics in college she started from scratch when she returned to the Bay Area from Asia. After several years of hard work, she graduated from her NP program having worked as a labor and delivery nurse and volunteering at a local San Francisco community health center until she began working for Planned Parenthood. Lyssa just celebrated 11 years at Planned Parenthood and has impacted thousands of lives through her kindness, compassion, and quality care. Today not only does she provide medical care, she is an advocate for the communities that she originally was called to support. Lyssa has also instilled this passion to be a warrior for social justice into her school aged daughter. When asked what drives her each day she says, “Health is a human right. There is so much disparity in this world and if this basic need is not equal among us, nothing can be!” Thank you, Lyssa, for all the families you have helped!
