A Fellow of the Association of Clinicians for the Underserved Spotlight
Nataly Tellez, Director of Strategic Initiatives at the California Primary Care Association (CPCA), is reimagining how policy and programming intersect to support community health centers and the patients they serve. Rooted in her own lived experiences and driven by a commitment to systemic change, Tellez’s journey reflects a deep understanding of the challenges faced by historically underserved communities.
From Rural Roots to System-Level Change
Tellez’s passion for healthcare access traces back to her upbringing in a rural community, where her family—immigrants and former farmworkers—struggled to navigate the healthcare system. “When I was younger and folks asked me what I wanted to grow up to be, I actually wanted to be a doctor,” she recalled. “That really came from a space of seeing my family’s own challenges and struggles of accessing healthcare in a rural community.”
Her early desire to serve evolved as she learned about public health during her undergraduate years. “I was really moved by the large-scale impacts that you could have,” Tellez explained, highlighting how policy, systems, and education intersect to improve population health.
Finding a Mission in Health Centers
Tellez’s path to public health took a pivotal turn during an internship with CPCA before her final year of college. “I knew about clinics, but I didn’t know about the extent of the community health center network,” she said. This experience introduced her to the vital role that federally qualified health centers play in serving underserved populations. “I was also very driven by the mission-oriented nature of who health centers serve,” Tellez shared, noting how these centers addressed challenges related to language barriers, geographic isolation, and lack of insurance present in her own community growing up.
After volunteering at a health center in Los Angeles, Tellez returned to CPCA as a full-time staff member, initially focusing on workforce development. “If I’m not going to be a physician, at least I can help create the physician workforce,” she reflected. Over nearly a decade, Tellez led initiatives to strengthen training pathways for physicians in underserved communities, particularly through graduate medical education and state budget advocacy.
Bridging Policy and Program Implementation
Tellez thrives in the space where policy meets practice. Her current work managing CPCA’s $20 million Medi-Cal Health Navigator program exemplifies her ability to translate policy into action. The initiative helps community health centers expand outreach and enrollment services, ensuring that the most underserved populations have access to health coverage.
Tellez’s earlier work on residency programs also highlights her approach to bridging policy and practice. “There’s significant power in advocating for state and federal funding and then turning around and actually helping health centers apply for it and create programs,” she explained. In this capacity, Tellez not only advocated for budget allocations but also developed toolkits and built coalitions, ensuring that resources were used effectively.
Centering Community, Service, and Collective Impact
Tellez credits much of her approach to leadership and systems thinking to her upbringing. Her mother, a teacher who later became a principal at Tellez’s own elementary school, instilled values of community and service. These values were reinforced through her mother’s dedication to volunteering and helping others, even staying late at school events to ensure everything ran smoothly. “She taught me a lot about volunteering and giving back,” Tellez shared, a lesson that continues to shape her leadership style.
She emphasizes that solving large-scale challenges requires collaboration. “There’s no one person, no one organization that’s going to be the end-all-be-all solution,” Tellez asserts. Whether she is leading strategic teams, managing cross-sector partnerships, or building coalitions, Tellez is driven by the belief that collective action and shared goals are key to moving systems toward healthcare access for all.
Looking Ahead: Strategy for Sustainable Impact
Currently, Tellez is focused on several strategic initiatives at CPCA, including partnerships, lending, and membership development. As she looks to the future, she has her sights set on a higher leadership role. Her goal is to guide multiple teams, amplify impact, and continue shaping healthcare systems to serve underserved communities more effectively.
“I want to be remembered as someone folks felt they could lean on to get the support they needed,” she says. “Someone who brought teams together and helped create meaningful change—not alone, but through shared purpose.”
Tellez’s vision is clear: she hopes to lead not just through authority, but through fostering collaboration and empowering others to drive systemic change. Her career has been about building bridges between policy and practice, community and service, and, ultimately, people and the systems that impact their health. Through her work at CPCA and beyond, Nataly Tellez continues to advocate for a more accessible healthcare system for all.
