Worcester Business Journal

wbjournal.com | August 17, 2020 | Worcester Business Journal 19 Aimee Peacock CFO, North America Congratulations! FLEXcon is proud to celebrate the recognition of Aimee Peacock as a 40 Under 40 award winner. Thank you for the leadership, passion, commitment and hard work that inspires us all. Congratulations to Aimee and to all the 40 under 40 recipients. Raised in Main South, Sliwoski spends her time committed to her community's youth and increasing its accessibility to healthy, local food. She served as the program coordinator for the YouthGROW program from 2012-2017, which employs 40 low-income teens to work on urban farms, producing more than 4,000 pounds of food. Sliwoski expanded YouthGROW to a year-around program while helping the program's creation of a product line, Drop It Like It's HOT SAUCE. Her commitment to youth empowerment led her to co-found the Central Mass Youth Jobs Coalition, a network of organizations educating and advocating for quality youth employment. She has served on the board of Worcester nonprofit Stone Soup, the Community Center for Nonviolent Solutions, the Youth Jobs Task Force, and the Youth Worker's Alliance. Currently, Sliwoski is on the board for Central Mass Grown, part of the Worcester Food Policy Council, and part of the research and evaluation committee for the Community Health Improvement Plan for the Worcester Division of Public Health. Sliwoski oversees all three of the Regional Environmental Council's programs including 62 community gardens. She helped create the AGES Conference, Worcester's first school gardens conference. The REC School Gardens network supports gardens at 20 schools and provides opportunities for more than 2,000 students. - Profile written by Devina Bhalla If you could spend 24 hours only in one city, which would you pick? Venice, Florence or Barcelona. I'm an art history major, so somewhere with museums and good food! If you gave a keynote graduation speech, what would your message be? Be humble and do the work. Don't assume your degree makes you an expert, get out and get experience. Learn from everyone around you. Grace Sliwoski, 32 Director of programs Regional Environmental Council, in Worcester Residence: Worcester Birthplace: Worcester Colleges: Columbia University, Clark University Even before a pandemic, the Family Health Center was an agency with its hands full: Helping a patient population less likely to have health insurance and at greater risk of homelessness or addiction. That's a sizable group of patients, more than 29,000 Greater Worcester residents and one out of every eight residents in the city. The Family Health Center then had to quickly adjust to providing another service – coronavirus tests and care – and Puca-Pinho has been central to the pandemic and other efforts. She oversees a multilingual staff of 39 and is responsible for the center's operations, patient registration and patient scheduling. Puca-Pinho proved herself at the center, where she was hired in 2011 as a Portuguese medical interpreter. She improved those operations by figuring something out: Medical interpreters could better support low-income immigrants, refugees and older adults who are less proficient in English if they were trained to beyond simple interpreting and instead helped improve access to care through patient navigation and insurance enrollment assistance. Now far more patients are getting that help. Calls for patient translation have risen nearly 50% since she began managing those operations in 2018. - G.W. Who would play you in the movie about your life? Gal Gadot, Wonder Woman What was your hardest achievement? I tackle every project with a positive attitude and open mind, as it is an opportunity for improvement. Whose career do you want to emulate? My father, who was a director of a community hospital and a psychiatric director in 1970's-1990's. He fought for equality, as he believed no patients should be counted as numbers but given respect and kindness. Unfortunately, our world did not have the opportunity to see his talents as he is now resting in peace. Karen Puca-Pinho, 35 Patient services supervisor Family Health Center of Worcester Residence: Marlborough Birthplace: Brazil 4 0 U N D E R F O R T Y

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