Plenary 3: New Partnerships with Financial Investors: Advancing Health Equity and Social Determinants of Health

William M. Rodgers III is vice president and director of the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Before joining the Fed, Rodgers served as professor of public policy and chief economist at the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He also served as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta during 2021.Rodgers is an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and served as its board chair for the last five years. He also serves as treasurer for the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Rodgers is a nonresident fellow at The Century Foundation and has served in many public capacities, including on President Obama’s Department of Labor transition team and as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor from 2000 to 2001. He served on the National Economic Association Board and is a past president. Rodgers also served on the U.S. Board of United Way Worldwide and currently works on the Board of Trustees of McDaniel College. He chairs the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s expert panel to evaluate the quality of compensation data collected from U.S. employers by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.His areas of expertise include compensation, pay equity, diversity and inclusion, labor market, and general economic trends. Rodgers has published articles in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, the Review of Black Political Economy, and Family Economics and Nutrition Review. His book, The Handbook on the Economics of Discrimination, was selected by Choice, the review journal of the American Library Association, as an Outstanding Academic

Orvin Kimbrough serves as the Chairman and CEO of Midwest BankCentre, where he helps to empower people, enable businesses and energize neighborhoods through the strength of the Bank’s financial services. Midwest BankCentre is St. Louis’ 2nd largest privately owned local bank, with over $2.5 billion in assets and over $2 billion in loans. Under Orv’s leadership, Midwest BankCentre creates the conditions that allow everyone to DREAM BIG and RISE TOGETHER.Prior to joining Midwest BankCentre, Orv spent nearly 20 years in leadership roles in prominent nonprofit agencies, most recently as the president and CEO of the United Way of Greater St. Louis. During his tenure as CEO, the United Way of St. Louis grew to the nation’s largest affiliate, raising nearly $80 million annually. Orv started with United Way in 2007 as vice president of major gifts.Orv is unlike any other bank CEO in the nation. From humble beginnings, he became an inspiring leader who has boosted the life trajectory of tens of thousands of people through his work in the nonprofit sector, while becoming the first and only African American to lead one of the 100+ mainstream banks in the St. Louis region.

During his 20-plus years in philanthropy, Dr. Dwayne Proctor has always worked to ensure that American communities were healthy and thriving. He joined MFH as President and CEO in 2021. The Foundation works to improve health through collaboration, convening, knowledge sharing and strategic investment, never losing sight of the equity lens that shapes all its work. Under his leadership, MFH strives to become an antiracist institution that fairly targets its resources to achieve health equity in Missouri by 2023. The Foundation recently launched a 20-year Food Justice strategic initiative to build collaborative efforts and galvanize shifts in current policies and practices that shape the way Missourians eat. MFH works to address a diverse mix of pressing issues across the state, including Medicaid expansion, childhood obesity, firearm violence and suicide prevention, crisis response, and behavioral health. The Foundation works on several strategic initiatives focused on women’s health, such as access to contraception, and infant health and vitality.Before his time at MFH, he served in a variety of roles at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In 2005, Dr. Proctor was tapped to lead RWJF’s national strategies to reverse the rise in childhood obesity rates. In this role, he collaborated with his colleagues to promote effective changes to public policies and industry practices, test and demonstrate innovative community and school-based environmental changes and leverage sustainable changes using both “grassroots” and “treetops” advocacy approaches to educate local and national leaders on their roles and opportunities to prevent childhood obesity.