Alexandria, VA — This past week, Mental Health America (MHA) held its Annual Delegate Assembly and voted in four new national board members. MHA is overseen by a volunteer Board of Directors composed of mental health and business professionals, affiliate leaders, people with lived experience, and advocates for our mission. Meeting quarterly, the Board directs the strategic objectives and policy of the organization.
Below are brief biographies of the new members:
Kana Enomoto
Kana Enomoto is a Senior Expert at McKinsey & Company, where she specializes in behavioral health, public health, and delivery-system reform. She has more than 20 years of experience as a federal executive in mental-health and substance-use policy, data, programs, and practice improvement. Kana is an adaptive leader with a strong record of achieving public-policy goals, delivering programmatic impact, and inspiring organizational and social change. Prior to joining McKinsey, Kana was a senior advisor and acting chief of staff to the Surgeon General of the United States. In this capacity, she provided strategic guidance to the Surgeon General’s efforts to combat the opioid epidemic. Previously, she was acting administrator for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Appointed in 2015 by former Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell, she provided executive direction and policy leadership for an agency with more than 600 employees and a fiscal year budget of over $4 billion.
Gustavo Loera
Dr. Gustavo Loera is an educational psychologist and leader in community mental health and wellness. For the past two decades, his work in education and research has been devoted to historically underserved communities in addressing health and educational disparities. In the area of leadership and training, Dr. Loera has worked with school districts, colleges/universities, government agencies, counties, and community-based organizations in capacity-building and advancing California’s health and behavioral health workforce. Working with Mental Health America of Los Angeles and the California Department of Education, he has helped develop college and career readiness frameworks and evaluated the effectiveness of career academies. Dr. Loera also developed school-based standards for state-level career pathways in mental health.
Courtney Lang
Courtney Lang is an independent health policy and public affairs consultant. She is the founder and principal of Langco + Partners, a boutique public affairs firm, recognized for the ability to mobilize constituencies to achieve business goals aligned with health policy. She has directed coalitions and legislative partnerships in support of federal and state-wide priorities, provided guidance on the implementation requirements of key provisions within the Affordable Care Act, and she has delivered strategic guidance on policies, disease management and care coordination provisions to a diverse array of constituencies. Courtney earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Pepperdine University and Juris Doctor from The Ohio State University College of Law. She also studied Comparative Health Law and Policy at St. Anne’s College, Oxford University in the United Kingdom. Recently, Courtney has served as a Guest Lecturer on legislative advocacy at the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy. She is a native of Washington, DC and has resided in Los Angeles, CA and Cleveland, OH.
Pierluigi Mancini
With over 30 years of experience in culturally and linguistically appropriate behavioral health treatment and prevention, Dr. Mancini is one of the most sought after national and international consultants and speakers on the subject of mental health and addiction; his areas of expertise are immigrant behavioral health and health disparities. His book ¡Mental! In The Trump Era - Ten Inspirational Stories About Immigrants Overcoming Addiction, Depression and Anxiety in America has recently been published to great reviews and is available in English and in Spanish on Amazon.com. Dr. Mancini founded Georgia’s only Latino behavioral health program in 1999 to serve the immigrant population by providing cultural and linguistically appropriate mental health and addiction treatment and prevention services in English, Spanish and Portuguese. He is currently serving as the Project Director for the National Hispanic and Latino Addiction Technology Transfer Center and the National Hispanic and Latino Prevention Technology Transfer Center. Dr. Mancini recently led a project to train clinicians in Latin America who are taking care of the over 4 million displaced Venezuelans arriving in Colombia, Perú, Ecuador, Brazil, Panamá and other countries.
“We are so pleased to bring on such a variety of talented individuals to MHA’s Board of Directors,” said Tom Starling, Chairman of the Board, MHA. “We look forward to working with all our new members to expand our visibility at the national, state and local levels, to address the issues facing those with mental health and addiction concerns, and to advance our mission of addressing mental illness Before Stage 4."