Volunteer of the Week: Dr. Charles Sneiderman

Congratulations and a big thank you are in order to our Volunteer of the Week, Dr. Charles Sneiderman. Dr. Sneiderman was also acknowledged by Fairfax KudoBoard’s #StrongerTogether Honorable Mention, so he is feeling the love this week! Dr. Sneiderman serves as the volunteer Medical Director for Culmore Clinic. A critical member of the Clinic’s leadership team, he oversees the work of the paid and volunteer medical providers and keeps up with current policy and practice, thus ensuring patients receive the highest quality medical care. In March 2020, Dr. Sneiderman served on the Crisis Response Team that quickly adapted Clinic function to respond to the pandemic, shifting from onsite to telehealth operations and then helping design a hybrid model to best meet the needs of an extremely vulnerable patient population that was disproportionately impacted by COVID-19.

According to Dr. Sneiderman, he volunteers with Culmore Clinic because…

The problems are challenging, the volunteers and staff are dedicated, and the patients are grateful.

Dr. Sneiderman is no stranger to affordable healthcare clinics and we are incredibly lucky to have him in our corner. He entered medical school at the end of the 60s, when the free clinic movement was a "radical challenge to the establishment,” he said. He had never considered himself a “people person,” but decided to volunteer at the Edgemont Community Clinic in Durham, NC to develop his clinical skills. “That experience changed my life and influenced my choice of family medicine as a specialty,” he told us. Forty years later, in 2012, after he retired from a career at NIH, he accompanied his late wife to a fundraising event at the home of Terry O'Hara Lavoie (Clinic Co-Founder). He was immediately recruited and has been volunteering ever since!

When asked about Dr. Sneiderman, Anne-Lise Quinn, our Executive Director said:

Dr. Sneiderman brings a wealth of experience and deep compassion for our patients to his role as our Medical Director. What I am also grateful for is his continued quest for knowledge and openness to new ideas and emerging best practices in patient care. 

We can’t thank you enough, Dr. Sneiderman! You enable The Clinic to function and we don’t know what we’d do without you! We are thrilled to honor you this week as Culmore Clinic’s Volunteer of the Week! Congratulations!

If you’d like to share a congratulatory message for Dr. Sneiderman, or any nice words, please feel free to comment below.