Emily Santich
Policy Analyst
Policy Analyst Emily Santich is actively involved in CHI assessment work, incorporating qualitative and quantitative analysis, facilitation, and community and stakeholder engagement. She's part of a team working with the Colorado Department of Early Childhood on a grant that seeks to address gaps in the early child care and education system for children ages birth through five. Emily has led maternal mental and behavioral health assessments for Centura Health and SCL Health (now Intermountain Healthcare) and community health needs assessments for San Luis Valley Health and for several Colorado communities served by Centura Health hospitals. She serves on CHI's Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Alliance and our Acclimate Colorado team.
Emily has deep expertise in maternal child health and sexual and reproductive health. As a maternal child health fellow at Boston University School of Public Health, she researched whether consent-inclusive sex education prevents sexual assault among high school students and reviewed sex education policy and consent-inclusive curricula for each state. She worked as a prevention educator for the Boston University Sexual Assault Response and Prevention Center, where she developed content for sexual violence prevention curricula, facilitated bystander intervention and sex positivity workshops for undergraduates, and planned events for Sexual Assault Awareness Week. As a health education intern with RISE in San Luis Obispo, Emily certified as a crisis counselor and led task force meetings to improve community response to sexual assault and intimate partner violence.
Before coming to CHI, Emily joined Colorado’s statewide COVID-19 response effort as a Laboratory Testing Coordinator Team Lead at the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment to support testing and immunization events. Her early work at CHI involved facilitating the Metro Denver Partnership for Health's COVID-19 Schools Workgroup and providing program support for their Immunization Ambassador Program. Later she planned the program evaluation and provided technical assistance for the state’s COVID-19 Primary Care Vaccination Program.
Emily earned a master’s degree in public health from the Boston University School of Public Health, where she interned at the Health Resources and Services Administration Office of Regional Operations (ORO). At ORO she conducted an environmental scan, policy analysis, and stakeholder analysis of school-based health centers in Massachusetts, which informed policy to advance health and educational equity among socially and economically disadvantaged children. Through a graduate assistantship in partnership with the City of Boston, she also managed a community-based fitness center that provides health and wellness programming to a diverse, predominantly low-income community.
In her spare time, Emily enjoys hiking, biking, and embracing her inner grandmother (petting her cat, drinking tea, and crocheting).
Skills: Needs assessment; stakeholder engagement; facilitation; program design, implementation, and evaluation
Sample Projects:
- Delta Dental of Colorado Foundation's Oral Health Data Dashboard
- The Anti-Hunger Community Toolkit
- Evaluating the COVID-19 Primary Care Vaccination Program
- Author of Colorado Is Facing a Child Care Crisis and Strengthening Relationships Between Health and Community Organizations to Support Health Equity
Focus Areas:
- Early childhood health
- Maternal mental health
- Sexual violence prevention
- Climate and health
- Public and community health