Kathryn Vezina recently retired after nine years as the Associate Executive Director at the Daniel Hanley Center for Health Leadership. She is now working part-time at the Maine Council on Aging as the Advocacy Coordinator & Project Lead on the Equity & Healthy Aging Initiative. Before Hanley, she worked at Counseling Services, Inc. in Saco and served as a health care attorney for the Augusta-based health law firm Kozak and Gayer. From 1995 to 1996, she served as Maine Family Planning’s Director of External Affairs and Legal Counsel, helping the organization make the transition to its current headquarters building. A graduate of the University of Maine Law School, Kathryn is a Registered Nurse. She holds a Master of Science in Nursing from University of California, San Francisco and, before law school, taught nursing at the University of Southern Maine. Her professional activities have been wide ranging: she has taught health law as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Policy; she was appointed to serve on the Maine Board of Bar Overseers Professional Ethics Commission; and she served as the Co-Chair of the Women’s Law Section of the Maine State Bar Association. From 2002 to 2007, she served as President and Chair of SAFE (Safe Abortions for Everyone) Fund.
George Hill has served as the President and CEO of Maine Family Planning since 1991. He has overall responsibility for all of Maine Family Planning’s operations, including Maine Family Planning’s 18 clinical sites and educational services, as well as legal, legislative, and community organizing activities. In 1994, he oversaw the development of the Augusta-based Parker Harris & Russell DeJong Center for Reproductive Health, which was created to provide abortion care in Central Maine. In 2015-2016, he raised private funds for the implementation of medication abortion via telemedicine in all 18 of Maine Family Planning’s health centers. In 2017, he helped raise sufficient private funds to initiate what became the Reproductive Empowerment Project, a program that provides reproductive and sexual health education to women experiencing substance use disorder in settings where they are already receiving services—drug treatment programs, sex trafficking safe houses, homeless shelters and needle exchange programs—and making reproductive health services available in those settings available via telemedicine.
Prior to joining Maine Family Planning, he served as Vice President of Program Services for Planned Parenthood of New York City where he oversaw a clinical program serving more than 33,000 New Yorkers annually and where he planned, developed and directed Project Street Beat, a mobile medical clinic serving the educational and medical needs of young sex workers in the South Bronx and Brooklyn.
Before becoming involved in reproductive and sexual health, he worked as Deputy Director of Program Development for Victim Services Agency (now Safe Horizons) where he was responsible for planning and developing a survivor-centered treatment program for child victims of incest and for developing innovative permanent and transitional housing options for survivors of domestic violence. On weekends, he trained emergency room personnel employed by public hospitals throughout New York City in rape evidence collection and patient-centered interviewing.