About Us

Community Cradle provides innovative and dynamic health programs and resources crucial to the lives of the women, babies and families of the Greater Capital Region.  

 

Community Cradle seeks to ensure that our Capital Region families have available the full range of quality, accessible, culturally-sensitive, and continuous health and social services needed to improve pregnancy outcomes and infant health, and to promote the health and well-being of the family.  Because we take a broad view of public health, we work on a wide range of issues including access to healthy foods, transportation, safe recreation, and smoke free housing, and the prevention of community violence.

We are a high impact not-for-profit organization governed by a diverse Board of Directors, which includes health and human service providers, professionals in other fields, and consumers. 

 

 

Meet our Staff 

Our professional staff consists of an Executive Director, a Perinatal Program Coordinator, an Outreach Health Educator, and a number of consultants and volunteers.

 

Lucy Pulitzer

Executive Director

Lucy comes to Community Cradle with an MS degree in Public Health Nutrition from Columbia University and a PhD in Medical Sociology from SUNY Albany.

Lucy has developed a nutrition education curriculum for use in a highly diverse area of rural northern California, worked with Southeast Asian refugees at Children’s Hospital in Oakland, and with homebound AIDS patients in Brooklyn. After teaching Medical Anthropology for 15 years to RNs and raising money for health and education programs in Haiti, she was excited to come to Community Cradle and return to her original field of interest, family health.

She has a daughter who attends Harvard Divinity School and a son who is pursuing a BA at SUNY.

Click here to watch our Executive Director talk about our current programming on Schenectady Today.

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Amanda Mulhern

Perinatal Program Coordinator

Amanda joined Community Cradle after receiving a BA in Personality/Social Psychology from Keene State College in New Hampshire and an MS in Community Health Education from The Sage Colleges.

Amanda has a strong interest in family and health literacy, adolescent health, and smoking cessation. She has completed a rural health survey in Albany, Rensselaer and Schenectady Counties and is seeking grant funding to provide programming in those areas.

A lifelong resident of the Capital Region, Amanda has recently purchased a home in Rotterdam and enjoys spending time in her backyard with her new Golden Retriever, Grady.

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Shannon McWilliam

Outreach Health Educator

Shannon was raised in Vermont and moved to the Capital Region after completing her BS in Human Development & Family Studies at the University of Vermont in May 2010. She is pursuing a Master's Degree in Public Health at SUNY Albany.

As an undergraduate, Shannon completed a Service Learning Lab with the Boys & Girls Club of Burlington, as well as a field experience practicum at the UVM Center for Health & Wellbeing in the Office of Health Promotions. She really enjoyed the interaction with her peers in this environment.

Shannon has an interest in nutrition and psychology, and also enjoys exercising. Her career plans include doing health promotion and possibly obtaining certification as a fitness instructor or personal trainer.

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Kate Paarlberg

Spanish Bilingual Consultant

Kate has recently moved to the Capital Region to pursue a PhD in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at SUNY Albany. She has a BA in Spanish from Hope College and an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth.

Kate spent several years as a political organizer in Washington D.C. and most recently worked in home-visiting with low income Spanish speaking parents.

Kate will be working with Community Cradle on projects designed to provide more comprehensive services to the Spanish speaking community of the Greater Capital Region.

An avid traveler, Kate has visited India and Palestine and traveled throughout Latin America.

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Polly Hartman

Literacy Consultant

Polly was born and raised in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. She received a Bachelors' Degree in elementary education from Carroll College and began teaching kindergarten and first grade in White Plains, NY. She received a Master's Degree in Family and Community Relations from Teacher's College of Columbia University, and a Master's of Library Science from SUNY/Albany and worked as a Children's Librarian at the Bethlehem Public Library until her in retirement in 2006. She provides advice and guidance to Community Cradle as we develop our family and health literacy program.

Polly loves to travel, having recently visited Thailand and Cambodia. She is the proud parent of two sons who are attorneys, and a daughter who is attending law school. 

  

Mary Wallen

Volunteer

Mary retired from the Albany County Hall of Records after 25 years of service, 18 of them as Executive Director. Her education includes a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and a Master of Library Science degree, both from SUNY Albany. She has worked in public libraries, and brought $800,000 in grant funding to Albany County while employed there. 

Mary joined Community Cradle as a volunteer because she wanted to use the skills she has developed over her lifetime to benefit young children and their mothers. She is also a volunteer Court Appointed Special Assistant in both Albany and Rensselaer Family Courts. She has two grown children and five grandchildren.

 

 

Our History

Community Cradle, formerly known as The Maternal Infant Network (MINCR) has its roots as a perinatal educational outreach program, having received initial outreach grant funding from the New York State Department of Health, Bureau of Women's Health in 1991. Community Cradle established itself as an independent, not-for-profit organization, and became one of the Comprehensive Prenatal-Perinatal Services Networks in 1995. Since then, Community Cradle has been working to remove barriers to accessing community and health services needed by infants and women of childbearing age by offering community education and resources, and by facilitating collaboration of consumers, health providers, and human service providers.