Dr. Minot Cleveland

An expert in health promotion and prevention, Dr. Minot Cleveland received his B.S. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his M.D. degree from Indiana University School of Medicine. He is board-certified in internal medicine and practiced emergency medicine at Legacy Health in Portland, Oregon. In 2010 he became Medical Director of Employee Health at Legacy until he retired from clinical medicine in 2022.

Throughout his 40 years of taking care of patients, Dr. Cleveland has been a public health advocate. He was the first project director of “Active Living by Design in Three Oregon Communities,” a grant funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He was a consultant for Oregon Research Institute grants focused on community-based approaches to promoting and increasing physical activity. Dr. Cleveland was the inaugural state chair of the Oregon Coalition for Promoting Physical Activity and the 2003 president of the National Coalition for Promoting Physical Activity. For many years he served on the Oregon Governor’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. He is a founding member of the Physical Education for All Kids (PEAK) Coalition of Oregon.

A longtime volunteer for the American Heart Association at the state, regional, and national levels, Dr. Cleveland was the 1996–97 president of the American Heart Association – Oregon Affiliate. Nominated by the AHA as a “Community Hero” for his efforts to promote physical activity and youth fitness, Dr. Cleveland was a torchbearer in the 1996 Olympic Torch Relay prior to the Atlanta Olympics. In 2000 the Northwest Affiliate of the AHA presented him with its first Golden Advocate Award for helping pass legislation in Oregon to create statewide standards in physical education.

Dr. Cleveland is an accomplished speaker on active living, health promotion, physical education and public policy. His advocacy for enjoyable physical activity includes working with individual patients, creating an innovative program for veterans, teaching medical school faculty and doctors-in-training, and public speaking. He champions the health benefits of nature, including a landmark study at Legacy Health that showed nurses taking a break in a hospital garden reduced their fatigue, anger, and burnout. Legacy now has 12 therapeutic gardens, the most of any medical center in the U.S. During the pandemic in 2022, the British Broadcasting Corporation featured him in a film about Legacy’s gardens as part of its series People Fixing the World.

Now an Oregonian, Minot Cleveland’s Hoosier roots run deep. He grew up in Anderson, Indiana, during the 1950s and ’60s in a General Motors town of 60,000. In a book about “Hoosier Hysteria,” his hometown is called Basketball Town, “the hottest basketball town on earth, the epicenter of grassroots basketball.” Not just a hotbed of Indiana high school basketball, Anderson was a place where participation in youth and adult sports was the norm. At Madison Heights High School, an excellent public school, he earned the coveted Pirate jacket by lettering in football, basketball, and baseball as a puny placekicker, scrappy guard, and agile infielder. He became a runner in medical school, completed nine marathons, and ran the 1990 Boston Marathon. He played three years of varsity basketball at MIT, finishing his career in 1972 as the fifth leading scorer in MIT history. He continued playing full court hoops until age 66. His parents, his coaches, and the Anderson community instilled in him a deep sense of Midwestern fairness. His coaches taught him the art of encouragement.