Celebrating National Health Center Week
We hope you’ll join us in celebrating this year’s National Health Center Week, which lifts up 1,400 community health centers around the country including Callen-Lorde. It’s the perfect time to celebrate our role as a CHC that provides compassionate, inclusive care.
Centers like Callen-Lorde are an integral part of the city and the country’s safety net system–which sprung directly from community health and Civil Rights movements to ensure everyone has access to high-quality care. Callen-Lorde is unique because it is one of just a handful of centers that specialize in affirming LGBTQ+ care.
The overarching theme of this year’s celebration is “powering communities through caring connections.” In light of our expertise in LGBTQ+ health, we’ve chosen to spotlight how queering health powers communities through primary care. When organizations like us care for patients’ whole bodies and minds, when we accept and amplify every individual who comes through our doors, we lift up entire communities.
Providing such care means that we meet a diverse set of patient needs. Many of the people we care for come from marginalized communities: As of 2023, of the nearly 20,000 individuals we see annually, 42% identify as white and about 45% identify as people of color. A quarter of our patients are transgender and 14% are nonbinary.
To meet everyone’s needs, we offer everything one might need–and sensitivity underpins everything we do, a core component of Callen-Lorde’s care that sets us apart from other primary care centers. Dental, behavioral, women’s and sexual health care are all part of the constellation of services that exemplify what it means to help a patient be their best self. Quality preventive care can lead to fewer hospitalizations, emergency rooms trips and costs for systems and patients.
However, such care is historically underfunded–which leads to health centers being unable to make quality hires and operate without stress. That’s why Callen-Lorde is using our voice to advocate for greater investment in primary care to break the cycle of underfunding. Read more about our push in an op-ed just published in amNY.
This week and every week, Callen-Lorde is committed to giving patients the space to grow healthier and more authentic, reach new people who need our care and educate the public on why good primary care is essential. We hope you’ll join us in celebrating National Health Center Week and fighting for greater investment in community organizations!