Meet Thrive Iowa State Director Page Humphrey

Iowa Thrive State Director Page Humphrey knows how vulnerable the experience can be to ask for help when your family needs support. She also knows that finding help shouldn't leave you overwhelmed and frustrated.

Humphrey knows first hand how difficult getting help can be. She had to learn the intrinsics of state and government support at an early age while caring for her mom, who has a cognitive functioning impairment. Getting the appropriate resources was a daunting task that sometimes felt impersonal. 

"My mom has a brain injury so I've been accessing those services and systems for a long time on her behalf," Humphrey said. 

Before coming to state government Humphrey worked as an advocate for people with brain injuries. She helped them and their families navigate the vast and complex world of resources.

"That's where I really learned about the systems in Iowa and how things work and how everything is funded," Humphrey said.

She said a lot of people don't understand just how difficult getting help can be.

"I understand first-hand the importance of having a navigator who's knowledgeable and compassionate and empathetic. It's easy to just say fill out the application, but the experience on the other side of that is so important."

Humphrey is the Community Services Bureau Chief at The Iowa Department of Health and Human Services. She assumed her role as State Director of Thrive Iowa last summer, one of many projects she is part of at IHHS, and has been busy working with coordinators and community alliances across Iowa to roll out the initiative in February.

"We're really excited to be implementing across the state," Humphrey said.

Thrive Iowa is a nonprofit community collaboration initiative that helps Iowans in more than a dozen key areas, including: housing, recovery, employment, education, transportation, mental health, physical health, financial stability, child care, dental care, food insecurities, safety, and legal support. 

Thrive Iowa was modeled after the Arkansas-based nonprofit Restore Hope, which has been helping bring families out of crises since the program's inception in 2015. At the time, Sebastian County was facing one of the largest incarceration rates in the country and families were being split apart at an alarming rate. It caused then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson to gather several faith-based nonprofits to discuss solutions.

"In Arkansas, historically, there are many faith-based nonprofits trying to help," Restore Hope CEO Paul Chapman said in a December, 2025 article. "The governor called them all to Little Rock for a summit called the Restore Hope Summit."

Restore Hope was designed to bring local alliances together with state agencies. The technology behind the success is HopeHub, a website that connects families in need to the proper advocates and service providers.

Locally, the communities in Iowa that will be served by Thrive Iowa will use the Restore Hope model, including HopeHub. It will allow for a smoother navigation between families in need and the resources they seek. 

"At its core it's resource navigation, Humphrey said. "It's helping families connect with resources in their communities but it's more than that because it helps communities come together to form an alliance."

Presently Thrive Iowa is in seven sites that serve the following counties in Iowa: Black Hawk, Buena Vista, Cass, Clayton, Fayette, Henry, Lee, Madison, Van Buren, Warren, and Webster.

Humphrey said by the end of the second year Thrive Iowa will serve 26 sites. 

"My goal for the next six moths is to start up seven really strong sites that get to capacity and are serving families," Humphrey said, adding that she believes Thrive Iowa will have good outcomes to tell the story about why this model is successful.

It's the hope that meeting the needs of people in their own communities by members of their own community will offer a more holistic experience for those in need of support than filling out paperwork at a government agency where they may feel less seen or important.

Prior to joining IHHS, Humphrey worked at Iowa Workforce Development where she helped people with disabilities find work. She knows how personal employment can be for people.

"So much of our identity is attached to what we do," Humphrey said. "It's usually one of the first questions we ask people when we meet strangers and that's so vulnerable to say 'I don't have a job' or 'my job isn't meeting my family's needs.'"

She said being open to getting help with employment is very personal.

"There's so much fear attached to that," Humphrey said. "You don't want to fail, you're scared and you don't have a lot of confidence and so a lot of this is tied back to being strength-based and helping people find strength that maybe that can't see for themselves."

She's optimistic some of the partners within Thrive Iowa will help put some of those tensions at ease. 

"Having somebody hear about their strengths from you just hits different for them," she said.