“Our clinic sees over half of all kids in Milwaukee County who are in foster care,” Greene said. “The world of foster care gets really complicated when it comes to health care consent. In dentistry, most kids under a certain age would benefit from using laughing gas when they get their dental care.” But in Wisconsin, laughing gas was classified as a specialized treatment. “We had to jump through hours’ worth of hoops per case to try and obtain appropriate written consent from the legal guardian.” A process that was made even more complicated when it was unclear whom the current guardian was.

So when a state task force on foster care reform reached out to her clinic looking for input, Greene wrote an impassioned letter to the Wisconsin Assembly Committee on Health in support of a bill that would reclassify laughing gas. A few months later, the bill was passed.

“As small as it was, just changing the classification of laughing gas, from a specialized, additional benefit and instead considering it routine care, meant that we no longer had to have our residents and our staff go through tremendously unnecessary paperwork to just get kids the care they needed,” she said.

Working so closely with foster children yielded an additional benefit. “My husband and I became pretty curious about becoming foster parents. We took a leap of faith and applied in 2016, and our son was placed with us in 2017. [We adopted him] in May 2018, and a little girl was placed with us last December and [we adopted her] in October.”

While Greene has her hands even more full now, she has no plans to slow down.

“I’m having a lot of fun so far, and I have a feeling that there will be many years of work to do.”

This story is part of the To Serve Better series, exploring connections between Harvard and neighborhoods across the United States.