Leah Combs Email & Phone Number

Boulder, Colorado

I provide research and writing support for Boulder County Public Health’s efforts to carry out a county wide community health assessment. Working with the Health Planning and Evaluation (HPE) team, I assist in identifying and compiling appropriate quantitative figures for select health indicators.

Charlottesville, Virginia

• Volunteers: Effectively managed and supervised 52 long-term volunteers and 836 group and short-term volunteers over the past year. Coordinated communication between volunteer, staff and volunteer leaders.• Marketing and Communications: Developed and implemented the store’s first yearly communications plan for volunteer outreach, and appreciation including speaking engagements, newsletters, surveys, websites and social media.• Reporting: Provided strategic reports and in-depth analysis on volunteer engagement using an online database. Worked to reshape past methods of collecting and reporting data in order to align with current outcome goals. • Partnerships: Engaged and maintained community partnerships with local work development organizations, businesses, churches, schools, camps, and other non-profits. Increased the number of new community partnerships by 20% from the previous year.

Mpumalanga, South Africa

For two years, I served as an HIV/AIDS Educator in South Africa under the Peace Corps’ Community HIV/AIDS Outreach Project. The primary focus was to improve the well-being of community members and empower them to adopt and maintain healthy behaviors. In order to reach this goal, I designed and implemented community wide health interventions with aims such as female empowerment, increasing uptake of HIV Counseling and Testing, and access to condoms. By the end of my service, 60 active condom distribution points were established throughout the community. A total of 203,250 male condoms and 10,208 female condoms were distributed from Aug 2013 – February 2015. Another focus during my service was capacity building for a local non-profit. I conducted trainings on topics such as facilitation and proper monitoring and evaluation methods. We worked together on grant writing and monitored projects for grant compliance. The time and energy spent on capacity building paid off, for the organization was able to receive a grant from international funder USAID two years in a row, increasing their ability to meet the health needs of vulnerable community members.

Master’S Degree, Health Education And Promotion

Bachelor Of Science (B.S.), Public Health

Activities and Societies: Study Abroad: HIV/AIDS and the Polynesian Perspective - Guam - summer 2010 Helped form JMU's first HIV/AIDS.