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ST. LOUIS — The leader of a ӣ����Ƶ clinic providing health care to immigrants and refugees is one of three area recipients of a $200,000 prize for “high-impact” Missourians from the Missouri Foundation for Health.

Diego Abente, the recipient of one of the first “Spark Prizes,” has worked as president and CEO of the ӣ����Ƶ-based nonprofit Casa de Salud since 2020. The clinic is located at 3200 Chouteau Avenue.

“Our ultimate goal at Casa is to help people be healthy, be well and be as productive as they can be for ourselves and for our region,” Abente said.

Abente is among five Missourians receiving $200,000 through the inaugural Spark Prize — a $1 million investment “in high-impact Missourians leading transformative work to improve health outcomes across the state,” according to the Missouri Foundation for Health.

“The Spark Prize is a bet on people,” foundation President and CEO Dwayne Proctor said in a statement. “The prize will hopefully fan the flames of their work for decades to come, and we’re looking forward to witnessing it.”

The Foundation for Health says the funding isn’t for a program, “but to accelerate their personal leadership journey.” The winners were chosen from among 170 nominations, the foundation said.

Three ӣ����Ƶans were selected for the first Spark Prize:

• Ciearra “CJ” Walker, the CEO of the Community Health Worker Coalition, whose whose coalition supports community health workers in becoming entrepreneurs and decision-makers in their fields. Community health workers use “lived experience to help others navigate systems and solve problems.”
• Kelly McGowan, founder of Transform 314, a group formed in 2022 “to build deeper civic muscle in communities often left out of the decision-making process.”
• Abente, of Casa de Salud, who said the clinic’s mental health services took off in 2020 and 2021, and that the clinic has also launched a behavioral health consulting practice embedded within clinical services.

“My big dream,” Abente said, “is to work, to use our platform, our mission at Casa, to help train health care providers in the mainstream health care systems ... to be more culturally competent, to understand language differences better.”

Two other Missourians were chosen to receive $200,000:

• Emily Brown, of Kansas City, is the co-founder and CEO of Attane Health, a company helping Medicaid patients “access food and care they need to thrive.”
• Evonnia Woods, of Columbia, the co-founder of Mid-Mo Repro, an organization addressing “reproductive justice at a grassroots level, particularly maternal health, abortion access, and racial health disparities.”

The organization also awarded four $25,000 grants to “Leaders to Watch”: Nicole Brown, of Joplin, executive director of One Joplin; Hopey Fink, of ӣ����Ƶ, an attorney at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri; Lawrence Simonson, of Columbia, executive director of Missouri Immunization Coalition; and Liza Weiss, of ӣ����Ƶ, founder and executive director of Missouri Appleseed.