Dr. Victoria Gillet: A passion for climate change and community health

Meet Victoria. Dr. Victoria Gillet (pronounced Gee-lay) runs a community health clinic at Aurora Sinai Medical Center. She serves as a primary care physician for residents on northwest side of Milwaukee, focusing on the Milwaukee neighborhood of Lindsay Heights.

Victoria calls climate change “probably the greatest threat to human health that’s coming and has started to make impacts on my patients’ lives.”

Since arriving in Milwaukee in 2021, she has built connections with nonprofit organizations including Nearby Nature, Milwaukee Riverkeeper, Sierra Club, Walnut Way, and Sixteenth Street Community Health Centers to find people making a difference in local environmental and community health. She’s also joined the Our Future Milwaukee coalition, which aims to push for the “10 big ideas” articulated by the City-County Task Force on Climate and Economic Equity.

She encourages anyone—young or old—to get connected—to follow your passion to find a group that is doing what you’re passionate about.

In her case, she was passionate about climate change and its connections to health. In 2019 Victoria joined the Wisconsin Health Professionals for Climate Action, a consortium of individuals who lobby for climate-friendly policies and practices. She’s now coalescing a Milwaukee chapter of this group. Their audience includes organizations looking for a health expert on climate issues, policymakers who control the flow of federal money, and health care administrators who make decisions about hospitals and large systems of practice. The influence of climate change extends both ways, Victoria notes: Greater accounting of climate risks to community health is needed throughout the health care profession, and changes at large health care institutions can move the needle toward reducing carbon emissions and adopting more sustainable practices.

Victoria’s passion fits within a growing awareness about the “social determinants of health.”

“I think that when we start medical school we think a lot about what’s happening inside of someone’s body as being the predominant thing that decides whether or not they’re healthy or not healthy,” Victoria says. “But the more time you spend with patients, especially patients who live in communities that have been really disinvested, you realize most of what drives an individual person’s health happens in their community...”

Climate change, Victoria says, is entwined with those social factors that can make or break health.

Flooding provides an example relevant for Milwaukee. In 2021, Victoria worked on a flood-related vulnerability assessment (published in 2022 by Groundwork MKE) to consider not only what areas might be prone to flooding hydrologically but also vulnerable demographically. People with decreased mobility or less economic resources to bounce back from flooding would be at greater risk for health impacts. It’s not just whether you can escape a flood—which might prove extra challenging for people in wheelchairs, for example—but also how you recover after sustaining damage. Flooded basements can lead to mold which can lead to asthma or other respiratory challenges. Using data from the vulnerability assessment, Victoria is interested in building up resilience among the most vulnerable in our city.

She also points out larger societal challenges that prevent simplistic policy responses. Owners and renters face different incentives and constraints for shoring up basements, making home repairs, and managing how water flows on their properties. Property owners with limited means may need financial or other assistance to take the most proactive steps (considering foundation repair, installing drain tile, or replacing pipes, for example, versus plugging in a dehumidifier). And since many people who are most vulnerable are also renters, influencing landlords to invest in their properties is another challenge.

Victoria hails from the Chicago suburbs. She attended college in California where she earned her bachelor’s degree in neuroscience at Pomona College in 2010, did medical lab and research work in Boston at Tufts University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in the early 2010s, then went to med school in Chicago where she earned her M.D. in 2017 from the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine. She did her medical residency at UW-Madison during the pandemic. Victoria landed the job with Aurora in 2021 and is now proud to call Milwaukee home. In 2022 she had just bought her first house here.

“I moved to Milwaukee because I wanted the opportunity to be in community with other folks who cared about these issues that I care about,” she says. “I want all of my advocacy to be centered in interpersonal communication with the people who I’m advocating for or elevating the message of what people need.”

In Lindsay Heights, the City of Milwaukee’s first Eco Neighborhood, she has found a sense of community.

“I think Lindsay Heights is the perfect microcosm of lots of people who care about the same things that I care about,” she says. “Walnut Way is a pillar of the entire Milwaukee community: a group of folks who really care about making sure that the place that they live is safe and green and beautiful and wonderful.”

She’s also discovered how the people of Lindsay Heights love their bioswales—vegetated engineered ditches along roadways that help manage water, and collectively reduce flood risk and improve water quality. She celebrates that green infrastructure like bioswales is seen by regular people as a way to address multiple issues—flooding, safety, keeping communities beautiful, green, and clean—in a single package. She credits MMSD, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, for supporting local partners in implementing green infrastructure. Victoria says not every community has a governmental body like MMSD making those kinds of projects possible.

Asked about her positive vision for the future of Milwaukee in 50 years, Victoria points out not only the need for more green infrastructure to manage increasingly intense storms associated with climate change, but also making sure those resources are equitably distributed.

“There’s the question of making sure we have enough and making sure we have it distributed in a way that is equitable,” she says. “I think that’s the vision of a beautiful future—every neighborhood has bioswales and rain gardens. They’ve got their graywater systems and their rain barrels so that when they want to water their garden they have enough water to do so even if we have prolonged droughts. Everybody thinking a little more intentionally in the space where they are, and having resources to think that way, to have your own beautiful space across the whole city. That’s the goal to hope for.”