Power of Practice 2025

Chi-Wei Chang joined Opower in 2013 with a background in international relations and experience on the language service provider vendor side. She was tasked with building a localization process for the company, then started to expand beyond the English-speaking international market. Since then, Opower has designed and refined a localization process that leverages behavioral science and captures the unique cultural aspects of each community, and has launched multiple international programs along with their first multilingual programs in the United States and Asia.

Ignatius Bau is an independent consultant, working with consumer and patient organizations, community-based organizations, physician and health care provider organizations, state health departments, and foundations on both health care and immigration policy issues. Bau has worked as an immigration and civil rights attorney, policy director at a national minority health organization, interim executive director at a statewide minority health advocacy organization, and program officer at a statewide health foundation. As a program officer at The California Endowment, he supported the work of the California Healthcare Interpreting Association, National Council for Interpreting in Health Care, Certification Commission for Healthcare Interpreters, National Health Law Program, and hospitals and health systems, and physician organizations to expand language access and support health care interpreters. He has served on expert advisory groups focused on health equity for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology; and for the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, National Quality Forum, Joint Commission, Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and Families USA.

Mara Youdelman, J.D., is a founding CCHI Commissioner and was CCHI’s first Chair. Mara is a Managing Attorney of the National Health Law Program’s Washington D.C. offices. She has worked at the National Health Law Program since 2000 on issues that include Medicaid & CHIP, the Affordable Care Act, language access, and civil rights. Mara coordinates the National Health Law Program’s federal regulatory and administrative work, including authoring and/or editing many of its comments on proposed regulations. Mara also leads the National Health Law Program’s work as language access. Recognized as a national expert on language access in health care settings, Mara has written a number of reports and participated on expert advisory panels on the subject. She was named a 2011 Language Access Champion by the National Council on Interpreting in Health Care (NCIHC) and a 2010 Health Reform Champion by SHIRE (the Summit Health Institute for Research and Education).

Johanna Parker is Lead Interpreter for Education and Training at Stanford Health Care. She is a CERTIFIED HEALTHCARE INTERPRETER™ and Federally- and California- Certified Court Interpreter, and holds a Master’s Degree in Translation and Interpretation from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (Spanish<>English). She also works as a contract seminar interpreter for the US Department of State and a freelance conference interpreter. She teaches medical interpreting at MIIS and continuing education workshops for medical and legal interpreters.

Katharine Allen, M.A., is a healthcare and community interpreter with over 3 decades of experience interpreting, training, and designing curricula. She is co-president of InterpretAmerica. She is lead developer and licensed trainer for The Indigenous Interpreter® 60-hour training and has helped embed professional interpreting into medical missions in Mexico. She was an instructor for the Glendon College Masters in Conference Interpreting and currently teaches for the UMASS Amherst Translation and Interpreting Studies online certificate program. Katharine is co-author of The Community Interpreter® International: An International Textbook and The Medical Interpreter-A Foundation Textbook for Medical Interpreting. Katharine has an MA in Translation and Interpretation from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Since 2003, Catherine Anderson, a founding commissioner for the Certification Commission of Healthcare Interpreters, has been the manager of the Language and Cultural Services department at Jewish Vocational Service (JVS) of Kansas City, Missouri where she supports an interpreter pool with language capacity in 35 languages. This program also provides Bridging the Gap™ interpreter training in its effort to deliver quality interpreter services and improve the health and well-being of the region’s non-English speaking residents. She offers cultural competency training in Kansas and Missouri and serves on a local health care advisory committee. She is also a member of the National Council on Interpreting in Health Care’s (NCIHC) Languages of Limited Diffusion workgroup. Previously, Catherine worked in Boston for 22 years as a teacher, advocate for immigrants’ rights and journalist. Her fourth book of poetry, published this year, Everyone I Love Immortal, weaves together themes of language and culture through the lives of working people.

Zarita Araujo-Lane, MSW, LICSW, has 30 plus years of experience and is recognized as one of the leading presenters on cross-cultural communication tools for small and large institutions servicing an array of professionals working in educational and healthcare fields. She is the president and founder of Cross Cultural Communication Systems, Inc. ™ (CCCS, Inc.™), a small woman minority owned business since 1996 with 250 interpreters and translators. CCCS, Inc.™ provides qualified cultural-linguistic services to healthcare, educational, legal and business by creating a seamless environment of teamwork and collaboration between customers, freelancers and staff members while delivering innovative, respectful, and reliable quality interpretation, translation and training services to a diverse population with regional, organizational and individual needs. Ms. Araujo-Lane was the director of a mental health cross-cultural team for over ten years at Health and Education Services in the North Shore area. She has published articles on cross-cultural management including chapters written in 1996 and 2005 on “Portuguese Families” for the second and third editions of the book, Ethnicity and Family Therapy, by Monica Mc Goldrick.