As the Vice President of Health & Human Services, Theresa Wolters' role is at the heart of MusiCares. Since joining the team in August 2022, she's led the organization's life-saving confidential preventive, emergency, and recovery programs for music professionals.
In celebration of Women's History Month, MusiCares highlights Wolters with an interview that dives deeper into her path to MusiCares, what keeps her inspired, and the importance of flexing your "leadership muscle."
What does your job entail?
As the Vice President for Health and Human Services, I lead our mission-focused efforts at MusiCares. This includes designing and advancing strategy and program operations to ensure MusiCares work is highly impactful and effective.
MusiCares provides customized care as music professionals navigate unanticipated life circumstances, as well as access to preventive care clinics, educational programming and support groups. The Health and Human Services team works with clients each day to provide individual care, often when music professionals are at their most difficult moments in life.
Our team also works with partners and providers across the United States to offer clinical services, referral resources, onsite activations at events and expert-driven educational programming.
What led you to a career in Health & Human Services at MusiCares?
My passion has always been finding better ways to deliver humanitarian services, with a good dose of adventure mixed in. At MusiCares, we are continually assessing the impact we have and asking how we can reach music professionals in different and optimal ways, and I love this about MusiCares.
Prior to joining MusiCares, I spent 20 years leading health, environment and economic development programs in low-resource countries, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. In my early and mid-career, I spent most of my time in remote villages, working with communities on any number of areas, like nutritional assessments, improving crop yields or malaria prevention.
Most recently, I was leading multinational programs to improve health systems and reduce infectious diseases. My career has brought adventures I couldn't have imagined, like cage diving with great white sharks, sunrise runs through the Ethiopian highlands with the greatest runners on earth, and most recently, getting to see Bruce Springsteen and Jason Isbell (my all time faves!) perform at Person Of The Year.
What inspires you the most about working on the MusiCares Team?
MusiCares is a team of do-ers, and I am so inspired by the way each person at MusiCares goes above and beyond every day to change the lives of the community we serve. The Health and Human Services team delivers our services, but our mission delivery wouldn't happen without our outstanding Development, Marketing, Finance & Operations, and Executive teams.
The MusiCares team understands the accountability we have to our clients, and this shows in the compassion and urgency every team member models. Equally importantly, this is the most creative and fun team I can imagine, and I am so privileged to be a part of this!
Do you have any advice for women just starting out in their careers, hoping to find a path to leadership?
The best organizations have leaders at every level, and MusiCares is an excellent example of this. You don't need to have an executive title to demonstrate leadership qualities, like thinking strategically, being resourceful and lifting others up.
In my experience, every woman in leadership was a recognized leader well before she had the senior title. So build your leadership muscle early and use it often. It may not feel like executives see your leadership capacity in early career roles, but trust me, they do.
What are you most proud of in the last year at MusiCares? What are you looking forward to?
The music industry is evolving, and so are the ways we support music professionals. In the last year, we launched Humans of Hip Hop (H3) and Resilience on the Road, two flagship programs to grow the reach of our services. We have also expanded the range of services we offer, including telehealth for substance use treatment, mental health and wellness spaces on tour, and new financial coaching support, to name just a few.
We will keep evolving our services, but what I am most proud of is what doesn't change. And that is the compassionate support the excellent Health and Human services team provides to our MusiCares clients.