Outstanding Women in Business: Lundi's trailblazing is remaking community health care

Photo | Matthew Wright Tamara Lundi

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By Grant Welker

When Tamara Lundi is working as the CEO of Worcester’s Community Healthlink, she’s not only leading a healthcare center with hundreds of workers. She’s making the job better for the former, early-career version of her: Someone working one-on-one with clients and hoping to make things better in any way possible.

Lundi also has a far broader purpose: In August, she became the first Black leader of a UMass Memorial Health Care entity, and as a Black woman, she’s made it into a role putting her firmly in the place of a role model for women of color who can now see themselves leading a major employer.

“It’s a pretty big deal,” Lundi said, having clearly given her racial and gender accomplishments some thought before, but still not settled on what to make of it. “I don’t know that I fully grasp it, to be honest.”

Plenty of reasons make it harder for Lundi to find the time to dwell on those accomplishments.

Lundi, who has worked at Community Healthlink since 2014, was named the agency’s interim CEO last December, just months before the coronavirus pandemic hit. She was a leader in the agency’s effort to remake its services, including testing clients for COVID-19 before being admitted into inpatient care and testing the staff and public.

The turbulent year hasn’t stopped Lundi from getting started on making improvements to Community Healthlink, making it easier for clients to access services, including primary care and behavioral health.

Lundi began her career not knowing she wanted to necessarily get into social work or health care, but that she wanted to help people. From her home state of Georgia, she went to The Ohio State University for her master’s in public health degree and completed a residency program at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus. She didn’t land a fellowship at Nationwide as she hoped but did get that opportunity somewhere else: at UMass Memorial. She joined Community Healthlink in 2014.

Lundi will now think back to when she started her career at an adolescent residential facility. No matter how much effort she’d make with clients, she couldn’t help but feel frustrated that she wasn’t able to make a wider impact. Today, she can.

It’s that attention to the most basic levels of care that, in part, made the Community Healthlink board know Lundi was the one for the job.

“This is a role that Tamara was born to do,” said Cheryl Lapriore, a Community Healthlink board member and the UMass Memorial Health Care chief of staff.

Lapriore sees Lundi as having the ability to both teach her staff better care as well as helping company executives better understand caring for vulnerable populations and the issues of racism, discrimination and equality based on her personal experiences.

Lapriore describes her as humble, too. Lundi, for example, made it her first order of business as Community Healthlink’s CEO to visit every location where it’s employees work, including in residential programs.

As for taking a step back to consider her gender and racial trailblazing at UMass Memorial, Lundi finds time to think about that, too. In a year when racial equality has become a cultural flashpoint, she hopes Black business leaders can become more common, especially if she can act as an example for others.

“If my success can be a light,” she added, “and if I can be a role model to anyone, not just Black women, absolutely it’s important.”