Meg Singer (Ross-Price), MPH, who served as Venice Family Clinic’s first executive director from 1975-1982, passed away peacefully on September 4 in Anacortes, Washington. She was 86.

Singer was a life-long public health expert who joined a young Venice Family Clinic in 1975. Clinic founders and early board members brought Singer on to transition it from an almost entirely volunteer-run organization to a sustainable one capable of growing to help more patients.

“She was an important reason why Venice Family Clinic survived,” founder Dr. Mayer Davidson said.

As a former UCLA student and employee, Singer helped develop the relationships that ultimately led to the formal affiliation between Venice Family Clinic and the university, providing crucial resources including malpractice insurance. She administered the Clinic’s first grants, which required transitioning the Clinic into an organization that could accept Medi-Cal. Those grants enabled the Clinic to move to a more permanent location.

“The fundamental trait that has carried through is the commitment to health care as a right, not a privilege,” Singer said in a 2003 interview. “Some other traits have been being flexible, innovative and persistent. A lot of persistence.”

Singer employed those traits as she helped the Clinic grow. She courted donors and recruited board members at the same time that she made runs to downtown Los Angeles warehouses for vaccine pickups and called volunteer doctors to fill shifts.

Through further fundraising, infrastructure development and volunteer coordination efforts, Singer helped expand Clinic services to include care to more people and for more specialized illnesses, affordable medication and lifestyle health services such as nutrition counseling. She is one of the co-founders of the Venice Art Walk. Ultimately she left feeling that the Clinic was set up to flourish.

“I think of it as the most important thing I’ve ever done,” Singer said in 2003. “It’s my baby. It’s pretty amazing what it’s become.”

Indeed, the Clinic would never have become what it is without Singer. We thank her for her years of service, and her tenacious determination that Venice Family Clinic should thrive during her time and beyond.