Katrina Clark, Health Care Hero, Dies At 72

Katrina Clark, a former Peace Corps volunteer who spent 40 years growing the Fair Haven Health Clinic into an anchor for the community and a model that provides accessible care for thousands of patients a year regardless of the ability to pay, died Aug. 25 two days after her 72nd birthday.

With two years in the Peace Corps in Colombia and fluent Spanish under her belt, along with a master’s degree in public health from Yale, Clark was a young idealist from the JFK era ready to take on a big challenge back in the 1970s.

That challenge was taking the helm of the Fair Haven Clinic, which she ran from 1973 until her retirement in 2013, when it was a much larger, multi-site institution renamed the Fair Haven Community Health Center.

Click here to find out more about a fund set up in her name to train and educate ​“individuals committed to providing high quality, compassionate care to vulnerable patients in Greater New Haven.” And click here to read about a memorial tribute event organized upon her retirement.

Clark took over a clinic that provided care only two evenings a week at the old Columbus School. When she retired, the center had long moved to headquarters in the rambling former Porto Funeral Home, a large Victorian house on Grand at Lloyd, and stayed open five days a week. Clark had also overseen the addition of five FHCHC-run school-based health centers at Clinton Avenue School; Fair Haven K‑8; J.S. Martinez School; Riverside Academy; and Wilbur Cross; the Fair Haven Medical Group, a geriatric clinic that FHCHC runs at Bella Vista elderly complex; and a free clinic on Saturdays for the uninsured run by Yale nurses, docs, and other clinicians.

At first, the clinic had a $5,000 budget and provided 500 visits. By the time Clark retired, it had a $12 million annual budget, with 15,000 patients seeing clinicians at all sites for an annual 165,000 visits a year.

An obituary follows:

Katrina Clark died peacefully at home in New Haven on August 25, 2017, nine weeks after receiving a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.

As Executive Director of the Fair Haven Community Health Center from 1973 to 2013, Katrina grew ​“The Clinic” from a small, volunteer-led storefront into a multi-campus healthcare organization that continues to deliver critical services to underserved people in the Fair Haven community today. Katrina believed that everyone deserves the right to high-quality, affordable health care, and under her leadership FHCHC has become an integral part of New Haven’s healthcare network.

At her retirement party, U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro said, ​“She has left an indelible mark on our community.”

Born in North Conway, New Hampshire, on August 23, 1945, Katrina Hardenbergh Clark grew up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, and graduated from Cornell University in 1967. She launched a career in public health as a Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia, working to improve living conditions by bringing fresh water to rural communities, and received the Peace Corps 25th Anniversary Sargent Shriver Award in 1986.

Katrina was inspired by her parents’ humanitarian efforts to ​“make the world a better place”: her father, Lincoln Clark, economics professor at New York University, was the first director of CARE (Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere) and delivered the first CARE packages to postwar Europe; her mother, Alice Clark, was active in public education and social issues from the Roosevelt administration onward, working in Washington, New York City, the rural Midwest, and Connecticut. Katrina received a Masters in Public Health from Yale University in 1971 and an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Albertus Magnus College in 1994.

In addition to leading FHCHC, she was a Lecturer in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale University, which honored her with the Yale School of Public Health Distinguished Alumni Award in 2013. Katrina provided gifted leadership to many healthcare organizations; she was Chair of the New Haven Board of Public Health and a member of the Board of Directors for The Community Health Network and Community Health Center Association of Connecticut.

After retiring from FHCHC, Katrina pursued many other interests including gardening, NYT crossword puzzle solving, and volunteering with the Friends of Edgewood Park, improving the park in which she walked every morning. She coached her beloved Kaycie to qualify as a therapy dog and together they brought comfort to Alzheimer patients.

She spent the last four years adventuring across the country with her wife, Bonnie Bayuk, and Kaycie in their RV, visiting friends and family and enjoying the beauty of the National Parks. Katrina is mourned and cherished by her family, friends, and colleagues, many of whom left messages for her in her final weeks at katrinaclark.org. She is survived by her wife and former Associate Director of FHCHC, Bonnie Bayuk; their sons, Jared Clark of New Haven, Jonathan Parley (Amy) of Seattle, WA and grandsons, Spencer and Jack; her brother Terry Clark (Lorna Ferguson) of Chicago; her sister Sheppy Douma of Kalamazoo, MI; her sister Kelsey Clark Underwood (John Cordell) of Berkeley, CA; her nieces Molly Douma Brewer (BJ) and Alice Underwood, and nephew Jaan Douma (Chris); as well as the entire Bayuk family; many cousins and her treasured New Haven Community. A memorial service will be held in New Haven this fall. Anyone wishing to honor Katrina’s memory is invited to contribute to The Katrina Clark Fund or the organization of your choice.