Sandra Shewry
Chair of the Board of Directors, CARESTAR Foundation
Sandra Shewry is a California-based health policy expert with leadership experience in public service and health philanthropy. She currently serves as board chair of the CARESTAR Foundation.
Before that Shewry spent 10 years at the California Health Care Foundation, leading the state health policy office and the external engagement teams of an organization dedicated to improving the health care system so that all Californians have the care they need.
Earlier in her career, Shewry worked for more than two decades in state government, which is when she got involved with the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. Beginning in the 1990s, she and UCLA CHPR founder Rick Brown worked on expanding health insurance in California.
Shewry served on California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) advisory bodies and spent hours working with Brown to help secure sustainable funding for the CHPR’s work.
“The belief that an open data set available to be analyzed and evaluated by anyone interested enough to learn how to use it was considered by many to be wild, expensive, possible extravagant, and unnecessary. It was, of course, brilliant, feasible, and necessary. This remains an aspect of the Center’s secret sauce of success," says Shewry.