Dorothy Cummings was a gifted social worker who served San Francisco and Central Valley children for more than three decades. With her husband, renowned psychologist Nicholas A. Cummings, she pioneered the integration of medical and behavioral health care in shared settings.

Dorothy Cummings died in December 2023 at age 96. To honor her, the Cummings Foundation for Behavioral Health this summer committed $500,000 to University of the Pacific to create the Dr. Dorothy M. Cummings Endowed Professorship in Social Work.

The foundation hopes its gift will help address a significant need in the Central Valley and beyond.

“There’s a behavioral health crisis in this country, driven in part by a shortage of practitioners. The Cummings Foundation and Pacific are involved in a solution to that problem,” explained Andy Cummings ’86, foundation board chair and Dorothy Cummings’ son.

The Cummings Professorship is the first endowed faculty position in the School of Health Sciences. The holder will facilitate behavioral health training in the school while developing care initiatives to serve vulnerable local populations.

“It’s so exciting to dedicate this professorship to my mother. She contributed so much to making behavioral health more visible, more accessible and giving people more of a reason to be passionate about it,” Andy Cummings said.

Dorothy Cummings was raised in Indiana during the Great Depression. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she met Nicholas Cummings, and later earned a master’s degree in social work. She held various positions while simultaneously working to support her husband’s academic and professional pursuits.

After leaving the workforce for more than a decade to raise her two children, she returned to full-time employment as a school social worker—a vocation to which, her son says, she brought an uncanny set of skills.

“She was completely unflappable; nothing ever fazed her,” he said. “That’s the kind of person she was, solving things that most people would feel overwhelmed by and always leading by example with a positive, hopeful attitude.”

Amanda West, chair and director of Pacific’s Master of Social Work program, points to the current need for practitioners like Dorothy Cummings to bridge a widespread care gap. West noted that nationally, while 74% of children go to a health care provider, only 4% see a mental health provider.

The gap, she explained, is caused by several factors including a shortage of providers, lack of access to care and the stigma surrounding mental health.

In semi-rural areas like the Central Valley, nearly 80% of behavioral health services are provided by social workers. West said she is delighted that the Cummings Professorship will address the national shortage of qualified practitioners by attracting the best in the field to train Pacific students.

“This gift will enable us to hire a faculty member who makes an impact not only through teaching, but by doing research to help implement services in the community, and by helping students grow through hands-on engagement,” West said. “This will benefit Stockton and Sacramento while also sustaining a very student-centered environment at Pacific, with opportunities above and beyond what we offer in the classroom.”

The School of Health Sciences is part of the Pacific Health Care Collaborative, an innovative combination of dental, medical and behavioral health services on the university’s Sacramento Campus. Opening this fall, the collaborative brings together students and faculty from multiple health disciplines to serve the community in a coordinated effort. The Cummings Professorship will ultimately enable the collaborative to include a behavioral health component.

“This gift opens up so many possibilities for Pacific,” said Nicoleta Bugnariu, founding dean of the School of Health Sciences. “It will help us recruit and retain professors with the highest levels of expertise in behavioral health, to brainstorm innovative care solutions, to train more students and ultimately, to expand access to care to more people.”

Andy Cummings is grateful that his mother’s legacy will help the university continue the work she so skillfully championed.

“My mother was a real problem solver, and I think she’d be proud to see how Pacific is equipping students to solve a significant problem and pay forward what they are receiving,” he said.

“Pacific is really a thought leader on this topic. It’s such a win-win situation to serve the community and provide a training ground for students, which is so important. Honestly, social work is the future of behavioral health.”

To learn more about supporting the Master of Social Work program and others in the School of Health Sciences, contact Lana Watts at 916.325.4656 or lwatts@pacific.edu.