Marin hires Berkeley official as health director

Berkeley’s health director has been chosen to lead the Marin County Department of Health and Human Services. Marin supervisors were expected to confirm the appointment of Lisa Warhuus at their meeting on Tuesday. Warhuus had spent close to four years as the top health official in Berkeley, where she oversaw an operating budget of more than $100 million and more than 200 employees across various divisions, including public health, mental health, environmental health, housing and community services, and aging services.

Prior to her tenure in Berkeley, Warhuus spent a decade at the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency as a director of children and youth initiatives and associate director. Warhuus holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, and master’s and doctoral degrees in psychology from Aarhus University in Denmark.

“We feel very fortunate to have someone with Dr. Warhuus’ skills and ability join our executive team,” said County Executive Matthew Hymel. “Throughout her career, Dr. Warhuus has demonstrated an ability to bring stakeholders together to effectively address our most complex community challenges.” Warhuus said she applied when she learned of the opening.

“I really wanted the opportunity to work at a larger scale,” she said. As Marin’s director, Warhuus will oversee more than 800 full time equivalent staff positions and manage an annual budget of $258 million. Her annual salary will be $288,433 with benefits. Marin’s former director, Benita McLarin, was receiving an annual salary of $302,868 when she retired at the end of December.

“I feel like the job that I have now has prepared me for quite a bit of the work that happens in HHS in Marin,” Warhuus said. Berkeley, like Marin, places an emphasis on dispensing health and housing services in an equitable, rather than an equal, way to those in need. As Warhuus states on her LinkedIn page, Berkeley “holds equity as the grounding point for each of the six HHCS divisions and works to respond to critical public health and housing issues by prioritizing community members who are furthest from opportunity, which in Berkeley are primarily Black, Indigenous and other people of color, and unhoused community members.” Likewise, as the associate director of the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency, Warhuus administered “school based health services to achieve health and education equity across 18 school districts in Alameda County.” Warhuus has also worked periodically as a consultant coaching businesses, nonprofits and government organizations in such areas as “change management, conflict resolution, and diversity and inclusion practices.” Warhuus said that in Berkeley, “We provide health care resources to the most vulnerable.” That meant that during the height of the COVID 19 pandemic, Berkeley health care workers made it as easy as possible for disadvantaged people to get vaccinated.

They vaccinated people in churches where Black people worshipped, in homeless shelters and the homes of the disabled. Dr. Matt Willis, Marin County’s public health officer, said, “Throughout the pandemic Berkeley and Marin were close collaborators, because we shared similar challenges and goals.

I greatly admire Lisa Warhuus’ pandemic response. In fact we borrowed some of their early vaccine equity strategies, including expanded mobile outreach.” Another aspect of Warhuss’s work in Berkeley dovetails with her new job in Marin: Berkeley is in the process of rolling out a two year, $4.5 million specialized care unit program.

“Historically, Berkeley has had a mobile crisis team that is basically a co response model, where somebody calls 911 and then the dispatch sends out a mental health team along with the police,” Warhuus said. “This new model is a pilot to see if we can send mobile crisis without police.” Marin County began expanding its mobile crisis team capabilities following calls to defund the police after the death of George Floyd during an arrest in Minneapolis in 2020.

Warhuss said she grew up in Berkeley during the 1970s and 1980s as “part of a mixed racial household.” Her father worked as a salesman and her mother is an artist. She met her husband, Jan Warhuus, a native of Denmark, while attending UC Berkeley. They lived in Aarhus, Denmark’s second largest city, during the early years of their marriage.

They have three adult children. Warhuus said that when she was earning her master’s degree she was focused on marital and family therapy, but when she began work on her doctorate her interest shifted to social psychology. “I was really interested in a lot of the postmodern thinkers,” she said of intellectuals such as Kenneth Gergen and Humberto Maturana.

Both Gergen and Maturana espouse the view that reality is purely a social construct. Many people today view both race and gender as nothing more than social constructs. According to a 2016 article in the Scientific American, “Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological meaning.” Warhuus said she also considers gender to be a social construct.

“To the extent that social constructs change, I would consider that a social construct,” Warhuus said, “because it’s changing right now. We need to adapt to that change if we’re really to nourish and support everyone in the community.”.