Paul F. O'Rourke

Paul F. O'Rourke (August 31, 1924 – January 28, 2012) was a founding member of Operation USA and its first board chair, the first Director of the California State Office of Economic Opportunity, a public health advisor to Senator Robert Kennedy and numerous state and federal agencies, and a Board Chairman of the San Francisco Trauma Foundation.

Born August 31, 1924, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Dr. O'Rourke was a 1948 graduate of Harvard University and Medical School and an early proponent of equal access to health care for underprivileged and disenfranchised populations. In 1959, while in his early 30s, he left a private practice in Marin County, California, to serve the state’s migrant laborers, minorities, and the poor.

Dr. O’Rourke earned a Master’s of Public Health Degree in Epidemiology at UC Berkeley, and in 1960 took his first public sector job as Director of Public Health Services in Imperial County, an agricultural region with the state’s highest rates of infant mortality and tuberculosis.

The Imperial Valley was at the time the focus of AFL-CIO efforts to unionize farm laborers, whose wages averaged 90 cents an hour. Under pressure from local growers and out of concern for the agricultural economy, the county Board of Supervisors directed Dr. O'Rourke to withhold health services from strikers and union sympathizers among the farm worker ranks, but he did not comply.

When more than 40 strikers were arrested and incarcerated in the county’s jail, Dr. O’Rourke was asked by the state to confirm that conditions at the jail were safe and sanitary. Dr. O’Rourke concluded that the jail was not adequate to house that many people. His report to that effect was considered by the Board of Supervisors to be insubordinate, and they discharged him from his post.

The California Department of Health Services then threatened to withhold state funding from Imperial County unless Dr. O’Rourke was reinstated, and although he did continue in his position for several more months, he ultimately resigned, stating that the political environment prevented him from carrying out the mission of the department. Dr. O’Rourke submitted his resignation one year from the date he accepted the position.

Shortly thereafter in 1962, he was appointed as Chief of Farm Worker Health Services for the California State Department of Health. He was considered the California state specialist in poverty matters and in 1964 became Special Assistant for Anti-Poverty Programs to Governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, who appointed him the first Director of the State Office of Economic Opportunity, an outgrowth of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. In that role Dr. O’Rourke helped coordinate the efforts of state agencies to establish equal access to housing, employment, education, and health services.

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