Rachel Abramson, RN, MS, IBCLC
Executive Director
Rachel Abramson is a master's-prepared nurse and an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant who has provided leadership for HealthConnect One since 1986. Rachel was a founder of the Chicago Breastfeeding Task Force, which expanded under her leadership to become Chicago Health Connection and subsequently became HealthConnect One. She was the Project Director for the four-year collaborative Chicago Health Connection Doula Project, originally funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harris Foundation. She has extensive experience in breastfeeding promotion and management, maternal-child health, community-based health services research, and nonprofit administration, and is the author of a number of articles on community issues in maternal-child health.
She accepted the 2003 National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies State Impact Award for the Harris Doula Institute at Chicago Health Connection, received the Start Early: Learning Begins at Birth Award from Voices for Illinois Children in 2003, and received the Harris Award from the Zero to Three Press with a book contract for manuscript development of The Community-based Doula: Reclaiming Birth, Empowering Families, published in 2006. She was awarded the first American Public Health Association Maternal and Child Health Outstanding Leadership and Advocacy Award and the Health and Medicine Policy Research Group Health Award in 2009.
