Levi Funches Jr., M.D., Eskenazi Health’s interim medical director for the Eskenazi Health NICU (neonatal intensive care unit), has always known he “wanted to serve and help people.” The military soon became his aim. As a young boy, he would pore over family albums, inspired by seeing his dad and uncles in uniform.

He paired his interest in the military with medical school aspirations in middle school. “We had these anatomy encyclopedias as a kid growing up,” he says, “and I would always be fascinated with the pages that kind of would stack and . . . you’d open the skin to the bones [and] to the anatomy . . . . ”

After earning his degree from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Funches served in the United States Army as a pediatrician and neonatologist, moving to various states and being deployed to Iraq. He and his wife and “biggest supporter” Ebony, both Chicago natives, agreed that he should leave active duty for a more settled home life before their kids, Levi and Amia, entered middle school.

Despite the many years he’d already devoted to the Army, leaving wasn’t easy. “I was really enjoying serving, the people I served with, the work I was doing,” he says. “I found out that the National Guard was an option as a medical provider . . . . I felt it was a way I could continue to serve . . . . ”

That love for service is what led Funches to practice at Eskenazi Health after he joined the faculty of Indiana University School of Medicine in 2016, seeing it as an “opportunity to serve the community, to serve those who need help sometimes the most.” Reflecting on the organization’s work with social drivers of health, Funches says, “We’re part of the community. We’re not just in the community.”

“I really like working in the NICU at Eskenazi [Health],” Funches adds, “because I really feel everyone there is really focused on giving the best care to the babies, prioritizing the families, making sure the families feel supported.”

Funches values the teamwork involved in neonatology, with input from nursing, the respiratory therapist, nutritionists, occupational and physical therapists and pharmacists. As he describes it, “everybody coming together, discussing how we can make sure we cover everything for this baby that’s ill, and then trying to piece it all together.”

In addition to his career and ongoing commitment to the Army National Guard, Funches is working to lower infant mortality rates as the medical director of Cradle Indy and as a member of Dedicated, Active, and Devoted Dads (D.A.D.), a workgroup for a Marion County Public Health Department community action team.

He is also a lifelong mentor, inspired by his parents’ community involvement. This Black History Month, he wants to share with Black medical students and residents what he recently told participants in 100 Black Men of America. “There will be challenges,” he says, including “just navigating . . . a lot of times [when] you may be the only person who looks like you in the room . . . . But just know that you belong there, and what you have to say is important, and it’s needed.” He hopes that those aspiring doctors will “embrace the challenges . . . . If you know that’s really what you want to do, and you feel that that’s in your heart . . . And we need them. We need all kinds of different backgrounds in our physicians.”

As a mentor to students, residents, veterans and community group members and as a member of the Indianapolis alumni chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity Inc., Funches’s biggest lesson has been to listen before advising. A recipient of military training, he struggles not to rush in with solutions — part of why, he jokes, his kids turn to his wife before him for guidance.

He hopes, however, that his children, mentees and students alike will take from him one bit of advice: that life is not about accolades, but  “about relationships and how you treat people in the relationships you form . . . . People don’t remember what you said and how you said it. They just remember how you made them feel.”

“I’m just trying to do my little part in the world to make it better . . . . ” he adds. “If all of us do a little part, and everybody focuses on doing something a little bit better, we make our communities better. We can make our cities, our states, our nation and our world better.”