Let’s Celebrate National Health Center Week

Community Health Centers such as Wallace have been making caring connections that strengthen communities throughout our nation for over 50 years.  

 

America’s Health Centers were born of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s, when a group of determined activists waged a fight to improve the lives of people living in poverty, who desperately needed health care. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s wide-ranging War on Poverty initiatives gave these health care pioneers their opportunity. Their proposals to establish health centers in medically underserved urban and rural communities bore fruit with the approval of funding in 1965 for the nation’s first two Health Centers—in Mound Bayou, Mississippi and Boston, Massachusetts. 

 

The Community Health Center movement has never looked back, exceeding the wildest expectations of those early activists. We are healers and innovators who look beyond medical charts to partner with our communities to address inequities that can cause poor health—including poverty, homelessness, substance use, mental illness, lack of nutrition, trauma, unemployment, social bias. Collectively we provide care to nearly 30 million underserved patients throughout the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. territories. Wallace is proud to be among them.