Terrie Andrews became president and CEO of Here Tomorrow in May 2025, bringing decades of leadership and a deep passion for behavioral health. A North Florida native with a background in psychology, she is committed to expanding the organization’s peer-based support programs across Northeast Florida to save lives and improve access to care.
Tell me about yourself and your background.
I was born and raised in North Florida. I lived in Clay County for my early life, and then went to Florida State University for psychology, and then took a pause on going to grad school. So, I opened up and ran restaurants and breweries in the Atlanta area for a couple of years. After I had my second child, I knew there was no way I could do that. I went back to school and back to grad school and then eventually, through a couple of different hoops, earned my Ph.D. After that, my family and I moved back here to Jacksonville.
Tell me about your background with behavioral health.
I did my training at UF Health, the Department of Trauma, and I absolutely loved it. That’s where I fell in love with the health care system and hospitals in general.
After I completed my training, I left and went to join Baptist as a psychologist who did lots of testing, such as testing for learning disabilities, IQs, autism and other stuff like that. I did that for about two years, and then they realized that I had that previous leadership experience from the restaurants and breweries, so I was promoted to outpatient director, and I did that for a few years.
Eventually, I took over all of behavioral health at Baptist and grew that department from about 30 FTEs to well over 550 FTEs when I left.
What was your initial draw to behavioral health?
Caring for law enforcement. My mom was actually the first of the first in Clay County. The first female police officer, the first female sergeant and the first female lieutenant.
I think it was working with them and listening to the stories, because my mom was over in the SVU unit for years. I think that’s what drew me to behavioral health. Initially, I thought I wanted to work with adults, but when I was doing my undergrad, I met someone whom I went to middle school with, and he didn’t recognize me, and that’s what made me start to think, “What if we started to intervene earlier? And how early can we intervene to change the trajectory of someone’s life?”
So, I started working with kids more than adults.
How did you first get involved with the Here Tomorrow organization?
I worked with Walmart Health when Walmart was in the health care space for a minute, and I thought, “This is my calling, I'm going to be able to help more people in behavioral health and solve the world’s problems of mental health and provide affordable access.”
But, of course, Walmart was not making money. They were losing money, so they exited the health care space, and I was doing some consulting after. While doing consulting, I linked back up with Joe Kenney, the founder of Here Tomorrow, whom I knew from my time at Baptist. Dolores Barr Weaver has a large endowment at Baptist, and we had some corpus earnings left over from the pandemic. She said she loved Here Tomorrow, so she said to take some money and partner up with Here Tomorrow and do something.
So, before I left Baptist, I put two of the Here Tomorrow peers on the adult psych unit downtown, where they still are today. That’s how I reconnected with and knew Joe from before, but after Baptist, I was just consulting with him and a few other organizations in town until eventually this position opened up and just seemed like the path I’m supposed to walk down.
Would you say you enjoy working at Here Tomorrow?
I absolutely love it. I think I love it because it’s helping so many people. We are definitely the, as I call it, the “disruptor” in health care because we’re doing things completely different. The readmission rates have been cut in half. The number of folks who are entering the Here Tomorrow program is well over 100 now. We can de-escalate situations and not immediately send them to the emergency room. It’s just such a different way to deliver mental health care.
What is your vision for the Here Tomorrow organization in the next few years?
Being at Here Tomorrow, it’s definitely scalable, and there’s such a need for this peer-based support that’s nonclinical.
That’s what I love about this. We have the adult program; we also have the military veterans and first responders program, and then we also have the teen program that serves ages 13-17. So, being able to scale all of those services across Northeast Florida, that’s what I plan to do.
For example, the teen program, as we grow that, we also have a program for the parents in case they also need work and need help. For right now, we’re focusing on Northeast Florida and seeing if we can change the emergency room admissions for behavioral health, as well as completed suicides.
