“I’m just an Oakland kid who loves his city, who loves the people in the city and has a heart for this community and wants to see young people strive and do better. It was a higher perspective that my dad offered me through his job here at Highland.”
Joseph Peters
HealthPATH Instructor
Alameda Health System–Highland Hospital
My dad was a nurse here at Highland Hospital for 30 years. He worked in the operating room. Now he’s retired, but he loved what he did and he loved working for this community.
And now I work here at Highland. I’ve been here for about four years.
Growing up in this community, I went to all the OUSD schools—Carl Munck, Montera, and then I went to Skyline High School and played for the local community sports teams.
I went away to college in Ohio, lived in New York for some time, but I always knew I was going to come back here. I felt like it was my mission to work with young people, to expose them to some of the things that I’ve had the privilege of being exposed to.
I applied for this job because it was in complete alignment with everything that I wanted to do, which was providing opportunities to students. The opportunity to shadow doctors and nurses gives students a visual of what it looks like to work in the healthcare field so that they can make that informed decision.
When you tell a young kid from East Oakland that they have the ability to become a doctor, they say, “No, not me.” But it’s important for the adults in the community to reinforce the confidence of those youth and let them know that they can do this, that there’s so much opportunity out there.
I’m just an Oakland kid who loves his city, who loves the people in the city and has a heart for this community and wants to see young people strive and do better. It was a higher perspective that my dad offered me through his job here at Highland.
It’s really crazy, the legacy that he established and that I just carry on, working for our community.