Senior Counselor
Chief Public Policy Officer
Conway Collis is Senior Counselor and Chief Public Policy Officer for Daughters of Charity Health System (DCHS). He provides strategic direction and implementation on the full range of policy issues affecting the DCHS local health ministries and the Daughters’ mission of serving and advocating for low-income Californians. He also represents DCHS before Congress, the state legislature and other public forums.
Following graduation from Occidental College and Stanford Law School, Collis served as a committee counsel on the U.S. Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee and domestic policy advisor to U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston, advising on federal domestic policy issues including poverty, health and social and legal services. He later served as founding executive director of the principal fundraising arm of the U.S. Senate Democratic Campaign Committee.
Collis was elected to the California State Board of Equalization, California’s governing tax and revenue agency, in 1982. Re-elected in 1986, he served as Chairman of the Equalization Board, overseeing an agency with over 1500 employees in 57 offices. He wrote and sponsored a number of new laws and regulations, including the State Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights, tax credits for employer-sponsored childcare, and the elimination of tax benefits for discriminatory private clubs. He also led the implementation of a broad modernization and reform of the state tax bureaucracy. While on the Board, Collis chaired a major 1986 statewide voter registration drive, registering nearly 300,000 voters, and was the proponent of a 1988 statewide initiative to address housing and homelessness. In 2001, he served as Chairman of the California State Senate Bipartisan Task Force on Homelessness.
Prior to joining DCHS full time in 2005, he was president of Collis Associates which provided public policy counsel to public and private sector clients, including DCHS since the health system’s inception in 2001. Most recently, on behalf of DCHS Collis initiated and proposed California’s hospital provider fee, and helped direct the proposal through state legislative enactment and federal government approval. The new law will have generated $9 billion for health care for low-income Californians and over $1 billion for children’s health care through FY 2013.
Collis is currently a member of the California State Commission on Children and Families (the state First 5 Commission), and also serves on the boards of Kids In Sports, the Alliance for Catholic Healthcare and Private Essential Access Community Hospitals.
