Working at Henry Ford Health System, Teaira Ross helps homeless patients find places to live, connects people in need with food resources and shares information on other service programs relating to health care, mental health and more with community members.
A patient resource coordinator and early intervention specialist for the Detroit-based hospital system, Ross blends advocacy, case management and patient education to help people with chronic conditions like HIV find what they need to improve their health and quality of life.
Ross, a sociology major who graduated this past spring, has wanted to do advocacy work since she was young. After all, she saw the impact it made for her. “Supportive people and services really helped to change my life and save me,” Ross says. “I know what it’s like to grow up poor in Detroit. My mother raised three girls by herself. I realized how important help is to address barriers from the time I was small. I wanted to put my cape on and save the world.”
To achieve that dream, Ross says she needed to go to college. “I just wasn’t sure how to do it at the time,” she says. She ultimately started at 51Ƶ-Dearborn in her 30s. “I’ll forever be grateful for this university helping me get to where I am today,” she reflects. Before starting college, however, she had some challenges to face.
As a child, Ross lived with a grandmother who struggled with mental illness. “There wasn’t adequate mental health support to help her at that time. Even as a family, we didn’t really know how to respond when she’d have a manic episode,” Ross, who is African American, says. “Mental illness is not something that’s often openly discussed in the Black community.”
Ross got pregnant at 16. “I was so scared to tell my mom. I told her right before school. She didn’t get angry like I thought she would. Instead, she acknowledged what I said and then told me to get my bookbag,” Ross says. “That one conversation shifted my perspective to realizing it wasn’t the end of the world. Life will keep moving forward — and so will I.” Ross finished high school in 2007 as a mother of a toddler.
After high school, she moved out, worked long hours at a fast food chain, among other places, and still couldn’t get ahead. She lost her home. “I had to live in my car for a summer. One of the reasons I worked so much is so that I’d have a place to go at night,” says Ross, noting that her young daughter stayed with a favorite aunt during that summer. “I needed to move beyond what I knew and get out of survival jobs. To reach my dreams, I needed to trust myself and take chances. I knew where I was at. I knew where I had come from and I knew where I wanted my daughter T’Kari and I to go. A degree was key in making that happen.”
Ross then sought out job opportunities and state resource programs. She landed an office job at an accounting firm where she got on-the-job training, saved up and found a two-bedroom apartment. “It was the first time my daughter had her own room. I decorated her room before she saw it and put her name on the wall and everything,” Ross says. “I will always remember the excitement in her face when she saw it.”
Ross also enrolled in the Wayne County Community College District. She inspired her mother to enroll too — and they both graduated from WCCCD in 2015. “I want people who are thinking about returning to school to know you can do it. It just might take you some time — I call that building capacity,” Ross says. “As a single mom who was in the working world, I didn’t know how I’d perform in a space with just-graduated high school students who are fluent in Spanish and are great with long division. But once I got there, I could see how my experiences fit in too. There’s enough space for us to learn from each other.”
After earning an associate degree in liberal arts, Ross set her sights on a bachelor’s. As Ross’ daughter started high school in 2020, Ross had a new school too: 51Ƶ-Dearborn. In addition to liking the program offerings, the friendliness of the campus and smaller class sizes, Ross discovered that she had an opportunity to get a scholarship through the 51Ƶ-Dearborn’s SOAR Program, which supports returning adult students who are parents, veterans or ages 25 and older seeking their first bachelor’s degree.
Ross says 51Ƶ-Dearborn did more than provide access to education, it also helped her find the right career focus — for example, lessons in Associate Professor of Anthropology Rose Wellman’s Contemporary Issues in Anthropology course prompted Ross to reflect on her experiences. “The class helped me to understand my own positionality and what that means in the world that I live in and, most importantly, what that means for the people that I serve,” she says. “My family had a lot of help from support services, but no one looked like me. I noticed that, even as a kid. If I wanted to change that, I figured I’d better start with me. I can be the person that I wanted to see.”
While at 51Ƶ-Dearborn, Ross did casework for the nonprofit UNIFIED-HIV Health and Beyond. She stressed to her clients that they were not defined by their diagnosis. “You're not living with HIV. HIV is living with you. You're a person above everything else,” she says. “We all have our struggles. We all need support to handle our challenges. We should not be defined by what we face — we are all much more than that.”
A year before her April 2025 graduation, Ross landed her current role at Henry Ford Health System. She meets with patients and compassionately listens. After assessing what services may help them, she offers to make phone calls, to provide resource lists and to make sure people have the care they need. “I’m here to build pathways to justice and belonging for underserved populations. People don't really need to be fixed — they need options or tools to get better or to do better. Sometimes they just want to be understood and know that someone cares.”
Looking at the path she’s traveled to improve life for her family, Ross sees how it all comes together. T’Kari, who is now 19 and a college student, is considering attending 51Ƶ-Dearborn in the fall. Ross, who has a career that she’s passionate about, is looking into earning a Master of Public Health — ideally at U-M. And she’s assisting underserved populations in the city where she was born and raised.
“Purpose is all about helping people turn what is into what could be,” Ross says. “I saw how it worked for my family and now, with my education, I’m able to do it for others.”
Story by Sarah Tuxbury
