This article was a winner of Lookout’s 2025 Journalism Scholarship Challenge, which invited high school students to highlight an unsung hero in their life. Learn more and find all of the winners here.
While driving to Monterey, it is easy to realize how many people spend countless hours in the fields doing backbreaking labor and most don’t have reliable health care for when they get sick or injured. As we age, we all need someone to care for us during the final days. Well, there is someone who works hard to make sure everyone is seen and taken care of in Santa Cruz County through her work and volunteering.
Dr. Katie Gabriel-Cox has lived in the Aptos area for over 16 years and has had a huge impact on her community. She is a wife and a mother to four sons, who are in college and high school. Gabriel-Cox works as an OB-GYN at Salud Para La Gente, a community health center in Watsonville. Along with a full-time commitment as a physician in South County, she is involved in a variety of different volunteer organizations throughout the community. Gabriel-Cox volunteers with Hospice of Santa Cruz County, an organization that supports people and their families who are nearing the end of life. She also volunteers with the Center for Farmworker Families, a nonprofit organization that helps to support families of agricultural workers in Watsonville.
Inspired by her patients, Gabriel-Cox puts in countless hours to support the people in our community who need it most. Through Hospice of Santa Cruz County, she spends her volunteer hours providing care, conversation and companionship to patients and their families as they near the end of life. She enjoys this volunteer activity because it allows her to support patients and their families during a quieter time in life. Furthermore, it allows her to see a side of medicine much different than what she experiences at her work in the hospital. Through her hospice work, she has grown to appreciate how important the simple act of caring can help those nearing the end of life.
At the Center for Farmworker Families, Gabriel-Cox is able to help the families of those whose births she attends at Watsonville Community Hospital. Through this organization, she is able to contribute to the social aspects of health such as having access to food, housing, and mental health services. She finds that it’s very important to address all these different aspects of health and that “health is not just a 15-minute doctor’s appointment … health is so many things,” adding, “There’s always more work to do,” meaning that everyone in the community can have an impact no matter what they do to help.
Every year during the Christmas season, the Center for Farmworker Families hosts a gift drive to raise money to provide gifts to farmworker families who struggle to provide gifts for their kids. Each year, the center helps as many families as possible and usually provides gifts to 1500 children, which helps so many families who might otherwise not receive gifts at Christmas. Gabriel-Cox shared a story about a mother who came up to her during the gift drive with tears rolling down her face, just so grateful and overwhelmed by the support that her family was receiving from the Center for Farmworker Families.
For over 16 years, Gabriel-Cox worked alongside nurse midwife Dana Ramsey, and not only were they colleagues, but became close friends through their work together at a local hospital. Ramsey talks about how Gabriel-Cox is very well respected by everyone in her workplace, and how her kindness and dedication shine through her everyday work and volunteer activities within the community. Ramsey explains that it was truly a joy to work alongside Gabriel-Cox, and how “even in stressful situations, Dr. Gabriel-Cox has a calm and confident demeanor.”
Ramsey confirms that patients love Gabriel-Cox because she spends time with them and gets to know them as individuals, which allows her to provide great medical care. Ramsey demonstrates how much dedication Gabriel-Cox shows to the community, saying, “Dr. Gabriel Cox has given more time to her community than any other physician that I am aware of in Santa Cruz County.” Ramsey is continuously inspired by Gabriel-Cox, saying that it is uncommon to find a doctor who cares that much about her patients and steps into the community even outside of the hospital as Gabriel-Cox does.
Gabriel-Cox is inspired by the endless sacrifices her patients make to give their children more opportunities and on top of that make their children feel so loved and cared for. Gabriel-Cox believes that health care is a right every person should have no matter where they live or what their background is.
Gabriel-Cox says that if you are in Santa Cruz County and you want to find a way to volunteer, the most important thing is to get close up with issues you are interested in or work to find places where you can talk to people to see what they are going through. She feels strongly that “every single person can have an impact and collectively if we all work towards something better, we can have enormous impacts.”