Mildred Lillian Sherk Kreider

Services will be hosted by the family for Mildred Sherk Kreider, a member of the University of Maryland School of Nursing faculty for 25 years who was active in the Presbyterian Church and Harford County land preservation programs, will be held at Hunting Ridge Presbyterian Church on Saturday, October 30th at 11 AM.

Dr. Kreider, who was 85, died on October 19th at Charlestown Senior Living Community in Catonsville. She had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 2007.

A member of the University of Maryland faculty since 1969, she served as chair of the School of Nursing's Department of Psychiatric, Community Health and Adult Primary Care Nursing and helped found Open Gates Nurse-Managed Health Center, which The Baltimore Sun called “a national model for clinics run by nurses instead of physicians.” After her retirement, Dr. Kreider became an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church and served one term as the Moderator of the Presbytery of Baltimore.

Mildred Lillian Sherk was born on January 26th, 1936 in Kitchener, Ontario, to Harold Sherk, a Mennonite minister and head of the Peace Section of the Mennonite Central Committee, and Mila Sherk, a homemaker. She had three older siblings: Iva, a pathologist; Harold, a minister; and Arthur, a professor of mathematics, all of whom predeceased her. She received her bachelor's degree in 1959 from Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana, where she met Dr. Sidney Kreider, whom she married in 1958. The couple was married for 33 years before Sidney’s death in 1991.

In 1965, the Kreiders moved to Baltimore, where Mildred earned an MS at the University of Maryland School of Nursing in 1968 and a PhD at the university’s School of Education in 1976. In 1993 she helped to create Open Gates Health Center, a full-service community-based health center located in Baltimore's Pigtown neighborhood, managed and staffed by University of Maryland Baltimore School of Nursing faculty and students. In 2017 the University of Maryland established the Dr. Mildred Kreider Scholarship Endowment to provide support for undergraduate or graduate students enrolled at School of Nursing in financial need.

Mildred and Sidney moved to a farm in Harford County in 1975, where they were among the founders of The Harford Land Trust (HLT), dedicated to local land preservation, whose office was located on their property. The Land Trust honored her with its Conservation Award in 2013.

In the 1980s, the Kreiders served as consultants for the Christian Medical Commission, part of the World Health Organization, in Geneva, Switzerland, traveling to China and Cambodia (then Kampuchea) to evaluate health facilities in the developing world.

Dr. Kreider was an active member of the Long Green Valley Church of the Brethren for 20 years. After her retirement, she earned a second master’s degree in theology at St. Mary’s Seminary Ecumenical Institute and became an elder in the Presbyterian Church. She belonged to Deer Creek Harmony Church in Darlington and, later, Hunting Ridge Presbyterian Church in Baltimore. She accompanied other church members on relief trips to Guatemala and Columbia, providing medical aid. In the summer of 2013, she and other congregants at Hunting Ridge established a presence at the intersection of Poplar Grove Street and Edmondson Avenue in west Baltimore, handing out cookies and juice and talking with people “to provide an alternative to the violence,” as she wrote in an essay for The Presbyterian Outlook. “Our message? That God came into our world in human form to teach us a different way to live together.”

Dr. Kreider is survived by two children, Timothy Ward Kreider, a writer in New York City, and Mary Elizabeth Kreider, a pulmonologist and professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; and two grandchildren, Lux and Sydney Barton, both students. The family suggests donations to the Dr. Mildred Kreider Scholarship Endowment at the University of Maryland School of Nursing (https://nursing-umaryland.givecorps.com/causes/594-university-of-maryland-school-of-nursing).