Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families hosts its Friends of Children Annual Luncheon to celebrate the power of advocacy in improving the lives of children and families across our state. Visit our event page for more information and to buy tickets.
This year we are privileged to honor Eric Gilmore and Dr. Sheldon Riklon for their important work on behalf of our state’s children, and for all they’ve done to ensure that kids in Arkansas have the resources and opportunities they need to be healthy and successful.
Eric Gilmore
Eric Gilmore is the Founder and CEO of Immerse Arkansas, a nonprofit he and his wife, Kara, launched in 2010 after serving as house parents to teens in foster care and witnessing firsthand the challenges of aging out of the system. Today, Immerse supports over 400 youth each year, empowering them to enter adulthood as overcomers: resilient, healing, and ready for life. Looking ahead, Immerse is committed to building a broad, reliable pathway to healing available to youth from crisis across the state. Eric holds a Master of Social Work degree. He and Kara live in Little Rock with their four children — Ean, Mercy Kate, Ezra, and Mabel Rose — where they enjoy camping, hiking, and all things outdoors.
Dr. Sheldon Riklon
Dr. Sheldon Riklon is a Professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), a Principal and Co-Investigator at the UAMS Institute for Community Health Innovation, and Co-Director for the Center for Pacific Islander Health, at the UAMS Northwest Campus. He is the inaugural recipient of the Peter O. Kohler, M.D., Endowed Chair in Health Disparities, received the 2021 Dr. Edith Irby Jones Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion Lifetime Achievement Award, and received the 2024 Dr. Joycelyn Elders’ Minority Health Pioneer Award.
Dr. Riklon is also a family physician at Community Clinic, which works with a large patient population of Marshallese and other underserved populations in Northwest Arkansas. He is a native Marshallese family physician, born and raised in the Marshall Islands, and is one of only two Marshallese in the world, to complete medical school and residency training from US accredited programs.
Dr. Riklon holds a bachelor’s in biology from the University of Hawai`i (UH) at Hilo and is a graduate of the John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM) at the UH Mānoa. After graduating from the UH Family Medicine Residency program at JABSOM, he became a faculty member of that same program and later served as family medicine clerkship director. His ongoing research interests focus on reducing health disparities by increasing patient-centered research within underrepresented Marshallese and other Pacific Islander immigrant communities, adapting and implementing a family model of diabetes self-management education, increasing access that the Marshallese community has to healthy food options, and developing culturally competent healthcare practices. Dr. Riklon also advocates for policy changes that create health equity for Pacific Islanders living in the US, with an emphasis on Compact of Free Association (COFA) citizens.