Tamara Fife is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and is a Choctaw descendent. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration and Master’s Degree in Public Health, with a community health focus. For the past three decades, she’s served as a subject matter expert on building organizational capacity to serve victims of crime. In 2000, she was the MDT lead for auditing a county-wide crime victim safety network. She used the audit findings to build out a community volunteer training program to support the safety network’s sustainability. She has administered private/state/federal grants since 2002. Tamara’s work continues to be building collaborations across the public and private sectors of a community to prevent violence against children and vulnerable adults. She lives with her husband on the traditional lands of the Coast Salish people in Washington State.
E-MDTs are part of a mission to "promote justice and heal victims of crime." Each of us, through our programs and services, fulfills a role in providing the resources and building the relationships that meet the needs of our community members. When we are successful, our communities, leaders, and funders help us maintain and continue our services. This is a process called "sustainability." It's our shared capacity to create, collect, build, and maintain the necessary resources for becoming part of the core infrastructure of our communities. These things might include: developing and maintaining new relationships, building skills of staff and community members, linking resource providers, integrating culture into services, and change with the existing and future needs of the community being served.
