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OUR Co-LEAD STAFF

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Kelsey Brennan

Kelsey Brennan serves as Entry & Services Manager for the Co-LEAD Response Team. In Kelsey’s role, she serves as a liaison with criminal legal partners to support jail releases into the program. Additionally, Kelsey supervises a team of Co-LEAD Shift Leads and provides coaching and support to Co-LEAD's Outreach Responders. In her supervisory role, she supports staff in client engagement, system navigation, and employee support. 

 

Previously, Kelsey worked as a LEAD case manager at the REACH program, focusing on intensive care coordination for individuals diverted from the criminal legal system. Also, during her time at REACH, she specialized in case management services for people who inject drugs, which would focus on linking people to MAT, access to sterile injection equipment, and healthcare coordination. Before her time at REACH, Kelsey has extensive experience in the youth services world within king county - working as a Case Manager at UDYC, focusing on youth development and resource access. Kelsey’s main focus during her career has been on outreach, partner relationships, and resource advocacy.

Also, during her time at REACH, she specialized in case management services for people who inject drugs, which would focus on linking people to MAT, access to sterile injection equipment, and healthcare coordination. Before her time at REACH, Kelsey has extensive experience in the youth services world within king county - working as a Case Manager at UDYC, focusing on youth development and resource access. Kelsey’s main focus during her career has been on outreach, partner relationships, and resource advocacy.

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Tabatha Davis

Tabatha Davis is the Operations Manager for the Co-LEAD Response Team. In her current role, she works with the Deputy Director to support program needs, staff, and participants. She brings over 20 years of administrative, leadership, and operations experience to PDA. 

 

Prior to joining PDA, Tabatha was the Director of a national media company, overseeing its operations in eight states. Tabatha earned her B.A. with an emphasis on Leadership from Capella University and her Nonprofit Management certificate from Highline College.

 

Outside of work, you can find Tabatha looking for new restaurants to try, enjoying a good book or on her way to the movies.

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Garrett Fonteyne

Garrett Fonteyne is an Outreach Responder for the Co-LEAD Response Team. In this role, Garrett provides outreach and case management to program participants transitioning from living outside into temporary lodging with supportive services. 

 

Before joining the Co-LEAD team, Garrett did outreach and intensive case management at the REACH Program, working specifically with individuals experiencing chronic homelessness who inject drugs and have complex medical needs. Garrett has worked in the social services field in the Seattle area since 2013. He prioritizes building relationships with individuals and empowering them through compassionate support to achieve greater well-being.

 

After moving to Seattle from California in 2008, Garrett started working at the iconic Pike Place market selling fruits and vegetables. Becoming a member of the market community and culture led him to call Seattle home. While not working, Garrett can be found playing guitar or spending time outdoors. 

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Jordan Haselnaus

Jordan Haselnaus is an Outreach Responder for the Co-LEAD team. Since moving to Seattle in 2014, Jordan has worked in public service as a case manager with people experiencing homelessness, as an affordable housing community engagement coordinator, and as a public safety project coordinator. She graduated from the University of Washington in 2018, with a Master's in Social Work focused on community-centered practice.

 

Outside of work, Jordan spends time with The Service Board, a youth-led social justice and snowboarding program. You can also catch her playing pick-up soccer, or going on long walks around the city.

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Ramon Hernandez

Ramon Hernandez is a Shift Lead for the Co-LEAD Response Team. Ramon’s role involves assisting system-impacted individuals by helping them adjust and adhere to the shelter in place order. This assistance includes, but is not limited to providing outreach services, determining survival needs, and coordinating healthcare consultations.  He also provides leadership, coaching, and guidance to a team of Outreach Responders.

Prior to becoming a Shift Lead, Ramon has been a member of Civil Survival, Seattle Central’s Prison Education and Reentry group, and Pathways to the UW Campus for System Impacted Students. He is an advocate for men and women that have been impacted by the criminal justice system. He continues to work to create space and access for men and women at institutions of higher learning and advocates for restoring the voting rights of formerly incarcerated men and women who have been disenfranchised. Ramon believes that speaking on behalf of these individuals will help others understand the importance of them having a voice and engaging civically.

 Ramon is passionate about helping those who do not have a voice. His goal is to help repair what he considers to be a fractured justice system. Ramon is pursuing a career where he cannot only help change the broken parts of the current legal system but also where he can advocate for systemic change so that men and women are afforded a fair trial and equal representation regardless of their background or financial access. Ramon wants to be a voice for the underrepresented and the disenfranchised so that they may have a fighting chance against a system that is set up against them.

When he is not working, Ramon is taking courses at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is a graduating senior pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Law, Societies and Justice. After graduation, Ramon aims to pursue a law degree. Ramon enjoys spending his free time perfecting his photography and videography skills. Additionally, he enjoys watching movies, going for runs, biking, exercising and spending time with his fiancé and loved ones. From being in foster care as a child to being a system impacted individual himself, Ramon has traveled a long journey to get where he is today.

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Dr. Cyn Kotarski, ND 

Dr. Cyn Kotarski, ND currently serves two important roles to support the newly formed and integrated care operations at PDA (specifically for Co-LEAD). Dr. Kotarski is the Medical Director for the organization and she also serves in a separate independent contractor role as the direct medical provider for Co-LEAD. These two roles are mutually reinforcing and of great value during a time when integrated and holistic care for marginalized populations is known to be what will actually transform healthcare delivery systems to provide excellent care, improve outcomes, and lower cost.

 

In her Medical Director role for PDA, as informed by direct services provided to the Co-LEAD program, Dr. Kotarski: 

  • Oversees care coordination, meaning how case management within Co-LEAD can and should be responsive to complex healthcare needs in order to provide a fully integrated approach that meets participants where they are.

  • Responds to the coordination of physical and behavioral healthcare needs on demand while other access to resources are advocated for and supported (housing, basic needs, employment, connection to community).

  • Supports a healthcare program that integrates with PDA’s community support systems to improve participant outcomes.  

  • Provides ongoing training to the Co-LEAD team and PDA staff to support accessing health care while remaining committed to the trauma informed, strengths-based, harm reduction model Co-LEAD is built upon.

 

Before coming to PDA, Dr. Kotarski established a primary care medical clinic in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle (2013) focused on providing access to, and delivery of, health care services to the LGBTQIA community.  She also served as Medical Director of the non-profit organization Integrative Care Outreach providing outreach naturopathic medical care for people experiencing homelessness in Seattle. From that experience she recognized that conventional and pharmaceutical-based medicine have an essential role, but for many, didn’t provide significant or long term benefits. 

 

Dr. Kotarski knows that the historical medical model of pathologizing the human condition has failed those we serve and believes that rates of iatrogenic harm are disproportionately higher for marginalized communities often resulting in avoidance of the medical industrial complex. She found that additional holistic support including nutritional counseling, alternative and adjunctive health care options, harm reduction, empowerment, stress management, and demonstrable allyship support complex and long term health outcomes. 

 

While the Affordable Care Act provided expanded insurance coverage for many, Dr. Kotarski found that even with the expansion many patients’ health care needs remained woefully unmet.   Accessing services is confounded by other social determinants of health, such as: housing insecurity, food insecurity, the opioid epidemic, legal system entanglement, systemic racism, and the oppression of marginalized people. She believes that not adequately addressing social determinants of health undermines health outcomes and harms people and communities. 

Dr. Kotarski is a proponent of advancing health equity, the destigmatization of mental illness and substance use disorders, MAT access, harm reduction, safe injection sites, PrEP access, housing first, and believes that a society should be measured by how it treats its most vulnerable members.

  

Dr. Kotarski has been licensed by the Washington State Board of Health as a Naturopathic Physician since she relocated to the Seattle area in 2013.  Born and raised in Buffalo, NY; she attended Buffalo State University of New York where she attained her BA in Psychology with honors. Dr. Kotarski completed her medical studies at The Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

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Tonia Lowery

Tonia Lowery is an Outreach Responder for the Co-LEAD Response Team. Tonia possesses over twenty years of experience, education, and training in the Criminal Justice and Public Service field.  Tonia is devoted to public service and uses her passion to outreach and support the diverse population we serve. 

Tonia’s education and experience is vast and includes: conflict resolution, dynamics of human behaviors, municipal, trial, DV and mental health court procedures.

When Tonia’s not at work, she enjoys spending time with her family and her 3 grandchildren (her heart and soul) and as a hobby, she refurbishes old furniture.

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Michelle McClendon

Michelle McClendon is a part-time Outreach Responder for the Co-LEAD Response Team.  In her role, she provides outreach, case management, and resources that promote stability to our program participants.

Michelle’s reach spans nationally, speaking publicly at various K-12 schools, colleges and universities, prisons and reentry organizations.  She continues to impact marginalized people by lending her expertise to education, employment, and housing initiatives.

Michelle was a member of the steering committee for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), a founding member of the Civil Survival Project, a committee member of the Formerly Incarcerated College Graduate Network (FICGN) and is a board member of the Housing Consortium. She also serves as the Reentry Advisor, Peer Counselor, and Housing Liaison at Highline College in Des Moines.

Michelle is the Community Engagement Director of Wonder of Women, an organization that mentors women and young women of color through storytelling while incorporating restorative justice and trauma-informed practices for holistic healing. Michelle is certified as a medical and pharmacy assistant and she’s a certified peer counselor for the state of WA. She is a college graduate and participates in continuing education courses around mental and behavioral health.

Michelle is also a motivational speaker, facilitator, educator, mentor, and advocate for the advancement of postsecondary education opportunities for people who have experienced incarceration. 

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Stephen Percer

Stephen “SJ” Percer is an Outreach Responder for the Co-LEAD Response Team. He works with program participants to provide social welfare outreach and engagement through transparent communication and everyday actions. SJ is a Northwest local who was labeled “at risk” as a youth and continued his behaviors into early adulthood, resulting in involvement with the streets, criminal legal system and the correctional system. Now SJ assists others, by helping them navigate those systems while fostering self-definition by actively practicing peer to peer mentoring principles.  As a Co-LEAD Outreach Responder SJ is a communication driven  criminal reform advocate who views any  interactions as an opportunity for overall growth.

 

SJ is a 2012 Toastmaster of the Year Recipient, the founding President of Inside Out Toastmasters Club (the first Reentry Toastmasters Club in the world), he's a Northwest Credible Messenger (N.W.C.M.) Facilitator, a Civil Survival volunteer and the owner of The F.A.C.T.S. Group (a communicatively focused company).

 

SJ is the proud father of Jayla, his beautiful daughter and lights up at the thought of her innocent smile.

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Ken Schoener

Ken Schoener is an Outreach Responder for the Co-LEAD Response Team. Prior to joining PDA, Ken served honorably in the USCG from 1984-1988, attending UMASS/Boston after discharge.

In 1991, Ken packed up his VW microbus and moved to the Seattle area, where he worked at the Fircrest school and contracted as a vocational counselor until 2006, when he built a successful Boston-sports-themed pizzeria and cheesesteak restaurant near the Everett event center. 

When the economy tanked in 2009, Ken was forced to close the restaurant and became a case manager/vocational counselor/property manager on the SE PACT team at Navos Mental Health where he worked for 8 years before joining the USPS as a letter carrier. In 2017, Ken began working with homeless veterans at the Mark Cooper house, connecting veterans with employment, VA healthcare, and housing and resources for veterans transitioning to their own homes. Ken believes the biggest injustice in this country is the homeless veteran population. He continues to advocate for veterans by connecting them with the assistance and benefits they deserve.

Ken lives with his wife on 60 acres of land outside of Mount Kenya, where he hopes to retire and build a primate campground and go on frequent safaris.

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Terique Scott

Terique Scott is an Outreach Responder for the Co-LEAD Response Team. Prior to joining PDA, Terique was the Outreach Director for Balance Our Tax Code. While there, Terique spent most of his time spreading awareness about the tax inequality between those who are considered low income and the wealthiest in the state of Washington.

 

Terique is passionate about politics and the process by which the great democracy we live in works.  Terique has been a Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board Member, a Belltown Community Council Board Member, and a 2016 graduate of the People’s Academy for Community Engagement (PACE), a program that supports and trains community members on how to be an effective civic activist and leader. 

 

Terique's free time is filled with exploring Washington trails, rowing, playing flag football, and bike riding.

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Josh Sutton

Josh Sutton is a Shift Lead for the Co-LEAD Response Team.  As a Shift Lead, Josh is responsible for providing outreach, engagement, and case management services to adults.  He also provides leadership support to a team of Outreach Responders.  Josh utilizes his lived and professional experience to connect with program participants and support them on their journey to stability.  Josh approaches his work with a core belief that everyone is redeemable.  Having been redeemed himself, Josh is a living testimony to the power of seeing someone beyond their current circumstances.

Josh earned his B.A. in Criminal Justice from the University of Washington Tacoma.  He also earned his A.A.S., Chemical Dependency Professional Certificate, and Case Aid Certificates from Olympic College.  When Josh isn’t at work, you can find him playing Shortstop for the Clean and Sober Softball League and spending time with his family.

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