Director of Community Service Department of Santa Fe

Kyra Ochoa, MPH, has been the Director of the Community Services Department for the City of Santa Fe since October of 2018. The Department comprises Senior Services, Youth and Family Services, and Libraries. A strong leader and a systems thinker, Ochoa has a deep belief in the importance of community engagement and public accountability. Raised in northern New Mexico and raising her family here, she has been both a consumer and creator of social services for New Mexican families. Since launching her career in Public Health, she has built broad stakeholder engagement and mobilized human and fiscal resources for maximum impact in diverse communities in Albuquerque, Taos, and Santa Fe. She thrives in identifying the needs of a given system and supporting the alignment and quality improvement of its components by motivating teams of people to align around a shared vision.

In 2017, while working at Santa Fe County, she launched Connect, an “Accountable Health Community” based on a national model that seeks to connect at-risk residents with professional navigators who can help them resolve social barriers to health, all the while building a stronger network of health and human services providers working together under one vision: to connect all Santa Fe residents with the resources they need for health and wellbeing. Today, over 90 agencies and 100 navigators in Santa Fe County participate in the network and close to 2,000 people have been served.