Melissa Moore is the Founder and Executive Director of RISE (Rising Into Self-Empowerment), a lived-experience–led nonprofit dedicated to transforming systemic responses to homelessness through outreach, advocacy, healthcare navigation, and structural reform. Drawing on her own experience of seven years of homelessness, she has emerged as a leading advocate for a more humane, rights-centered approach to care and service delivery.
Prior to founding RISE, Melissa served as a Community Health Outreach Worker with the Tiburcio Vasquez Health Center Street Medicine Team. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Street Medicine Institute, participates in Alameda County Continuum of Care committees, and contributes to a range of advisory and consulting efforts that elevate lived experience in policy development and implementation. Across all her roles, she works to ensure that systems are informed not only by data and clinical expertise, but also by the lived realities of those most directly impacted.
Her advocacy spans healthcare, housing, public policy, and human rights, with a consistent focus on reshaping institutional engagement with people experiencing homelessness. Melissa has spoken internationally on topics including street medicine, encampment response, healthcare equity, patient empowerment, and lived-experience leadership. She has contributed to National Health Care for the Homeless Council programming, served on expert panels, and participated in media discussions that challenge stigma and advance dignity-centered approaches.
Melissa is a recipient of the 2020 Alameda County COVID Hero Award, recognizing her essential outreach and support efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic. She continues to work at the intersection of community engagement, systems reform, and narrative change, with a growing emphasis on “existential street medicine”—the principle that care begins with recognition of a person’s full humanity, not solely their immediate medical needs.
As this year’s keynote speaker, Melissa invites healthcare professionals and policymakers to expand their understanding of care beyond clinical intervention to existential questions that need to be discussed. She challenges audiences to consider belonging, visibility, and human connection as foundational elements of healing, offering a perspective grounded in lived experience and oriented toward systemic transformation.
