Being a Health Center helps us provide unconditional care

Evergreen Health is a federally qualified health center: a community primary care provider that follows strict requirements in order to serve communities that lack access to healthcare. On top of the 40 years of Evergreen history we have to draw from as we work to provide unconditional care to our patients, receiving our health center designation in 2020 gave us access to a lot of additional resources as we’ve grown.

The mission of health centers and Evergreen’s mission align: to provide quality accessible, community-based and patient-centered care to communities who face barriers in accessing healthcare. Christine Kemp, Evergreen’s director of clinical quality, says that health centers aim to “match the strength of local communities with the power of federal resources.”

The history of the health center movement begins in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s, when the Black Panther Party and other activists opened 13 free community health centers to provide quality accessible healthcare to Black people facing barriers to care.

In 1965 Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration began introducing legislation to respond to the national poverty rate, and with the help of these activists, Neighborhood Health Centers became one of its tactics to provide healthcare and social services to underserved communities. In exchange for following strict standards for quality accessible care, health centers would qualify for special support and funding from the federal government.

Christine says that though Evergreen was already meeting many of these standards before applying for our health center designation in 2020, we worked for nearly two years to establish all the policies and procedures we needed to qualify.

Some of the health center requirements we follow to provide unconditional care to our patients are:

• Affordability: no patient can be turned away because of their inability to pay, and services are charged on a sliding fee scale
• Accessibility: health centers remove as many barriers to care as possible with supportive services like harm reduction, transportation assistance, translation assistance and medical case management
• Patient-centeredness: at least 50% of the governing board of directors are patients of the health center

“We’re proud to be a health center because it takes a lot of hard work,” says Christine. We’re required to re-apply for designation every three years, and at our most recent visit with representatives of the federal government, Evergreen received an A+ grade with no findings.

Christine says that Evergreen’s application to become a health center “coincided with our growth from a smaller primary care and HIV care focused practice to a larger, comprehensive healthcare provider, formalized our growth and gave us a lot of guidelines for growing well.”

“Health centers match the strength of local communities with the power of federal resources.”

-Christine Kemp, director of clinical quality, Evergreen Health

Our designation came at an incredibly timely moment in December of 2020: when Covid-19 first emerged, health center staff were among the first to qualify for vaccination. Getting federal support to quickly vaccinate our staff and begin distributing vaccines to our community allowed Evergreen to become a core vaccination site in Western New York, and health centers like Evergreen were a primary component to the national Covid-19 response.

Though Evergreen didn’t apply to become a health center until 2020, we’ve been working to provide unconditionally accessible quality care to underserved communities since 1983, when a small group of volunteers came together to address the emerging HIV and AIDS crisis in Western New York.

The early staff of the agency, at that time named Buffalo AIDS Task Force, learned from the from the CDC’s findings and from lived experience that many of the people who were most vulnerable to HIV transmissions were people who were already underserved by the healthcare industry, including LGBTQ+ people, people who injected substances, and people without medical insurance.

As we’ve grown through the last 40 years, we’ve prioritized providing quality accessible care to these underserved communities. We’ve now grown to become a comprehensive healthcare delivery system that provides medical, supportive and behavioral health services for the whole family all under one roof. We’re lucky to have the support of the health center movement as we work toward these shared goals.

To see a full timeline of Evergreen’s growth, visit our historical timeline page.

Evergreen Health, founded in 1983 under the name AIDS Community Services, has been providing unconditional care to underserved communities for 40 years.
Help us continue to provide unconditional medical, behavioral and supportive services for another 40 years by becoming a donor today.