Victoria Perkins is currently the Board member responsible for external and internal communications for the Billi Odegaard Scholarship Fund. She brings a lifelong commitment to healthcare equity both professionally and personally.

Victoria’s earliest exposure to racial bias was toward Japanese farmers on Vashon Island, where she was raised, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, shortly after WW II.  Later, when she worked in public health, first in Washington and then Multnomah counties, she spent 13 years caring for ethnically diverse individuals in their communities, migrant camps, jails and homeless encampments.  She and her colleague Jean Lemke, RN, BSN, set up the clinic that would become the International Health Clinic in SE Portland.  These families were usually economically disadvantaged, struggling to find adequate housing, coping with no regular health care or care that was not culturally sensitive and suffering from food insecurity.  She moved on to the Center For Health Research with Kaiser Permanente NW Region as their Manager of Clinical Services for 18 years and another 3 years as the Manager of Geriatrics and LTC.  She finished out her career with programmatic work at CareOregon and FamilyCare, Inc. Health Plans.

Victoria worked with the State of Oregon as a volunteer in a variety of roles, including the State of Oregon and Multnomah County IRB, Commission for Women, and Commission for Interpreters.  She worked with an executive committee that created the Prioritized List for the Oregon Health Plan under the direction of John Kitzhaber, MD, at that time Oregon’s governor.  She was the founding chair of Kaiser Permanente’s Diversity Committee.  Victoria was a master trainer for the Kaiser Permanente Middle Management and Physician Manager Development Program for 7 years.  She was also the all-site clinic manager for most of the Nike World Masters Games providing health care services for over 15,000 athletes from all over the world during 21 days, in 1998.

Victoria took her pre-nursing at the University of Washington and then transferred to Portland, Oregon, where she received her diploma at Emanuel Hospital School of Nursing.  She returned to the University of Washington and attended Medex NW, becoming a Family Nurse Practitioner and cared for patients in that capacity for 30 years.  She is licensed and has practiced for the last 52 years as a Registered Nurse.