Pioneers in Health Episode 22, April 24, 2025 – Ton Mirás Neira, Community Health Worker Project Manager, Communities Organizing to Promote Equity (COPE), Department of Family Medicine, University of Kansas Medical Center.

Antonio (Ton) Mirás Neira was born and raised in Galicia, Spain. He studied sign language interpretation at the Universidade de Vigo and graduated with a specialized degree in the psychosociology of the Deaf community and interpretation for the Deaf-Blind. He worked actively as an interpreter with the Deaf and Deaf-Blind community and became an official sign-language interpreter for the Spanish Parliament. He taught non-verbal communication and body expression at the University of Vigo, in collaboration with the university's Dramatic Arts department.

In 2012, Mirás Neira moved to the U.S. and began working as a Community Health Worker (CHW) with KC CARE Health Center. His enterprising work with patients in the emergency room at University of Kansas Hospital earned him the honor of KC CARE Health Center’s Employee of the Year for 2015.

Since 2016, he has been supervising a team of CHWs whose focus has been to assist the underserved population in Wyandotte County by empowering patients to get access to care and to address social needs among the African American, Refugee and Latino communities.

Mirás Neira has been the Co-Chair of the Kansas Community Health Worker Coalition for three years, empowering other CHWs across Kansas, promoting education for CHWs and networking with different programs within the state.

Currently, he is the Project Manager of the COPE project at The University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC) and is currently managing 60 CHWs in 20 different counties throughout Kansas to address clients’ social determinants of health. Mirás Neira has developed and taught CHW and Supervisory training for his employees and co-designed a tailored database for CHWs to capture their outcomes and successes.