Kathy Ahoy

SLHP Founder and Public Health Nursing Partner

Kathy Ahoy, Public Health Nurse of Alameda County, co-founded Street Level Health Project to serve the communities of Oakland in 2000, and the project quickly became more than health care. Kathy actively nurtured the sharing of knowledge, resources and skills, built relationships that bonded all together in the work of caring for and responding to the particular health disparities and health issues of the growing immigration population. Through her work, Kathy is committed to human flourishing and working for the common good of all. Her passion and compassion to serve the most vulnerable people in our community derives from her own life history and background.

Kathy came to the USA as a refugee/immigrant from India and speaks Nepali, Hindi and some Chinese.Born in Kalimpong, India, Kathy and her family were unjustly jailed and interned in India for three-and-a-half years, due to a border dispute between India and China. Sponsored out of the internment camp by the Loreto Sisters of Calcutta, the city where her mother was born and raised, Kathy and her classmates were put to work taking care of the orphans. They were also required to help in the work of Mother Theresa and her Sisters of Charity by giving out food and dispensing Dapsone to the Hanson disease clients outside the walls of the school compound. Perhaps this was the beginning of Kathy’s predilection to care for the poor and needy.

She graduated from UCSF with a Masters in Community and Cross-cultural Nursing. Currently, she is mentor/preceptor for many health care students. Hunger and homelessness are no stranger to Kathy. Her history/memory of poverty, hunger and injustice equips Kathy with a fierce determination to bring justice, understanding and compassion to the underprivileged and disadvantaged whom she seeks out and serves. In 1986, she worked in Africa (Sudan and Eritrea) with the famine refugees. Kathy has put her eager energy into implementing the vision of Public Health, trying to find, motivate and collaborate with willing and resourceful partners to provide and improve health and quality of life for the whole community.