nwasianweekly.com
Nov. 11, 2006

Vivian Lee created programs in the 1970s that encouraged
people of color to become nurses.

Service to others is a family tradition

By James Tabafunda
For the Northwest Asian Weekly

Many Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders working in health care today owe their success to Vivian Lee. More than two decades ago, the distinguished and now-retired nurse and public health administrator established training programs to encourage people of color to enter the nursing profession.

APIs and other students of color at the University of Washington also can thank Lee for her scholarship fund-raising and mentorship activities. These days, she feels honored when they call her “Auntie Viv.”

But such accomplishments and visibility might have been difficult to predict if you had met her when she was a young girl growing up in a military family in Japan.

Lee’s mother often helped out at community events, even though she was busy with work and her five children. Usually at her mom’s side at various meetings and luncheons, Lee recalled, “My mother was a very gregarious woman. She drew people to her, and I was a very shy child.” The young girl preferred to stay out of the limelight.

Along with her mother and other military wives, Lee donated blood every two weeks to help save soldiers injured in the Korean War. “My mother appreciated everyone,” she remembers.

Both her mother and stepfather taught Lee to lend a hand to those who needed it, no matter the obstacles. Her mom, Alvirita Little, passed away in June at the age of 93.

Lee received a certificate of nursing in 1958, then a bachelor’s degree in nursing the following year, from the UW. She was the first African American registered nurse to work at the VA Medical Center. She later earned her master’s in public administration from the University of Puget Sound in 1980.

In 1971, she created policy that prioritized the training of minority nurse practitioners. At a time when the Southeast Asian immigrant population was growing by leaps and bounds in the Greater Seattle area, Lee said she was “disturbed” that the number of Asian staffers in clinics wasn’t also growing.

Some of the first Asian American nurses who benefited from that policy and trained at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, Calif., included Karen Matsuda and Eliane Dao.

“Vivian was very innovative,” said Matsuda. “In her job (as the founding director of the Office of Women’s Health within the U.S. Public Health Service Region X), she’s been a risk taker and an innovator. She’s been a very powerful and influential person in her career.”

Lee worked on the largest study of the health needs of Asian women — particularly those of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian heritage. She even managed to gain the support and participation of the Centers for Disease Control. The recommendations from that study were later distributed to health-care professionals around the country for free.

When she was nearing retirement, former UW Alumni Association president Larry Matsuda asked her to chair a committee responsible for drafting the association’s first-ever Diversity Plan.

Lee believes in celebrating individual cultural differences while also bringing everyone together. So in 1995, she co-founded the Multicultural Alumni Partnership with Dr. Millie Russell. MAP’s annual Bridging the Gap breakfast, held every Homecoming Saturday, raises scholarship money for minority students and honors successful alumni of color.

In 1997, the Vivian O. Lee Women’s Health Award was created by the U.S. Public Health Service Region X to honor those “who have shown leadership, creativity and vision in improving the health of women and their families.” Dr. Nancy Woods, then-associate dean for nursing research and director of the UW School of Nursing’s Center for Women’s Health Research, said, “Vivian Lee left a rich legacy of service to women most in need.

Today, Lee volunteers in a variety of community youth activities. “The youth are our future,” reminded Lee.

She now knows being in the limelight isn’t so bad. “I was fortunate. I had a good example in my mom,” she said. “I’ve become more like my mother than I thought.”

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