The ‘Comings & Goings’ column chronicles important life changes of Blade readers.

The Comings and Goings column is about sharing the professional successes of our community. We want to recognize those landing new jobs, new clients for their business, joining boards of organizations and other achievements. Please share your successes with us at [email protected].

Congratulations to Patrick McCabe on opening his new public relations agency, McCabe Message Partners. Its focus is health and the issues that affect it. McCabe, an expert in healthcare communications, co-founded GYMR Public Relations, which closed May 31 after 18 years.

Patrick McCabe (Photo courtesy McCabe)

When announcing the new firm, he reported all of his more than three-dozen clients from GYMR have signed on with the new agency and his entire team of 20 joined him in launching the new venture. McCabe said, “We help clients talk about health—plain and simple—whether it’s how policies affect it, how care is provided and paid for, or how the health of people and communities can be improved.”

McCabe Message Partners provides a wide range of communications services including media relations, message development and testing, strategic communications planning, tailored outreach to influential policymaker and stakeholder communities, orchestrating meetings and events, and other services.

The team helps lead communications for the award-winning Choosing Wisely campaign, in which more than 70 healthcare provider organizations identified common medical tests and procedures they say are overused and should be questioned. The team also leads communications for a series of more than 100 influential health policy briefs developed by researchers at The Urban Institute and funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

For nearly three decades, McCabe has designed successful, affordable strategies that reach policymakers, consumers, healthcare providers, educators and minority populations. His work on the importance of affordable, accessible health insurance, for example, resulted in coverage in all of the nation’s top 100 newspapers and every network news program. He has been published numerous times on topics including crisis management, user-tested message development, strategic communications planning, media relations and training, increasing communications capacity for nonprofits and others.

Prior to co-founding GYMR Public Relations, he was a vice president at Fleishman Hillard; a lobbyist and spokesperson for a health-related trade association; and journalist in metropolitan Washington, D.C. McCabe graduated with high honors from the University of Notre Dame.

Congratulations also to Sterling Washington who added another consulting position to his resume. His new role is as a consultant and personal stylist for J. Hilburn Custom Menswear. The company was started by two young Wall Street executives, who said, “We studied the men’s luxury market and saw that nobody was delivering quality custom clothing and personal service at a price that didn’t break the bank. So we set our vision, and J.Hilburn was born.”

Sterling Washington

Washington is currently doing consulting in several different areas. He is an editor and writer. Many in D.C. know him from when he served as Mayor Vincent Gray’s director of the Office of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Affairs. While there, his accomplishments included: training more than 40 percent of District government employees in LGBT cultural competency as well as numerous federal government employees and staff at several local long-term care facilities; and coordinating a multi-agency working group that successfully barred discrimination by health insurance companies on the basis of gender identity and expression.

Washington’s background includes serving as resource and grant development manager for the Center for Black Equity; working on grants, newsletters and community relations at US Helping US; serving as a presidential appointee in the White House during the Clinton administration first as Special Assistant to the Director, Office of Administration and later as the Information Technology Management Team Coordinator. He has a bachelor’s degree in political science from the George Washington University, and a bachelor’s degree in music history from Howard University where he also led the Bisexual, Lesbian and Gay Organization of Students at Howard.