|
This expansion during
Miller’s years at the helm is a dramatic turn of events
considering what transpired at the agency during its first
20 years of existence. NHA experienced enough difficulties
over its first two decades that its very existence had been
threatened on more than one occasion.
The agency came about
through the extraordinary efforts of its founder, Cordelia
Martin, and the funds provided by the Model Cities Program
of the late 1960’s.
Martin, a community
activist who was involved in a number of organizations such
as the NAACP and the Lucas County Democratic Party, was
passionate about a number of causes – in particular helping
the poor, especially helping the poor obtain health care.
In 1969, Martin, then a
supervisor of community workers for the Expanded Family
Planning Project of the Planned Parenthood League of Toledo,
Inc and chairman of the Health Functional Committee,
gathered around her a group of like-minded individuals who
were equally concerned about the lack of proper health care
that was available to those less fortunate in the greater
Toledo area.
The group, with Martin in
the lead, was determined “to make sure that people in the
neighborhood have a place to go where color wouldn’t
matter,” says Miller. “They decided to open a health center
because so many of their neighbors and friends were dying
from causes that they could have been saved from.”
Within a year, federal
funding through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban
Development had been obtained and the Cordelia Martin
Interim Health Center was opened in its original location at
1636 W. Bancroft Street.
During those early days
the clinic was only open a few days a week based upon the
availability of the volunteers who staffed the operation.
Federal funding to
continue the work of that staff, the board and volunteers
was never a given. Model Cities funds ended in 1974 and
obtaining continuing federal funds was an ongoing challenge.
In 1975, Daisy Smith, RN,
who had been with the Center from the beginning and for whom
one of the NHA facilities is now named, brought together 14
women to organize themselves as the Cordelia Martin Health
Center Auxiliary in order to augment the organization and to
help fulfill a range of needs – chief among those needs was
raising funds.
The Auxiliary organized
bake sales, rummage sales and charity bazaars along with
sponsoring the cleaning of inside facilities and yard work.
The woman of the Auxiliary provided valuable supplemental
funds for the Center over the next decade and a half,
nevertheless, financially, NHA was never out of the woods.
By 1978, the Center had 25
people on staff, had increased patient visits to 600 per
month and had added an Adolescent Health Care Program
through a grant from the U.S. Department of Health,
Education and Welfare.
By 2002, nine years into
Miller’s arrival, NHA had nine clinics under its wings, a
120-member staff and an $8 million budget.
“We added a number of
clinics over the years,” said Miller this past summer a she
was contemplating the completion of Nexus. “We now manage 16
facilities such as a clinic for the homeless [Mildred
Bayer], a women’s health clinic [Huron Street] and thee
dental clinics. We’ve developed a number of specialty
services over the past 20 years.”
The $11 million Nexus
Health Care clinic came about as the result of a
collaboration between a number of government and
non-government entities. The Lucas County Land Bank,
administered by the Lucas County Treasurer’s Office,
acquired the land and spent $45,000 to clean up the site.
The federal government
provided a grant of $5 million through the Department of
Health and Human Services for construction costs and the
Local Initiatives Support Corp (LISC) financed the balance
of $6 million through tax credits.
Nexus was opened to the
public for general services on Wednesday, October 19. |
