Our History

The early days

In the beginning of 2020, at the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, we created this project to keep the health and wellbeing of Arizona communities safe.

• We began as a procurement team for Personal Protective Equipment that we donated to organizations in need all over Arizona
• We provided community COVID-19 testing and consultation for patients that we identified as positive
• We counseled organizations on how to prevent disease outbreaks
• Through this work across the State, we built relationships and partnerships with groups in underserved and completely unserved areas and populations. 
• We have had a presence in homeless shelters, memory care facilities, assisted living facilities, rural communities, tribal communities, and Title 1 Schools, among others.
• Our initial mission was to simply protect the facilities that help people stay safeguarded from COVID-19 through the various waves over the last 2 years 

Our history working with Asylum seekers

Over 50,000 people served and counting since our inception in March 2021 

• After working closely with the International Rescue Committee Welcome Center over a number of months providing COVID-19 testing and disease mitigation, our NGO partner approached us in February 2021 to help plan for an anticipated influx of 10x migrants in the midst of a COVID-19 surge
• On March 2nd, 2021, we had our team ready with a pop up clinic to begin seeing people that had entered the United States from countries in areas of conflict or disaster
• While we did not have a clear source of funding, we started work immediately after seeing the obvious humanitarian and public health need. 
• What began as a 30 patient a day clinic quickly grew to a clinic serving numbers upwards of 250. Some days, we saw 300 people.
• Not only was the capacity of our patients growing, we also realized that the population we were serving had complex and unmet medical needs. We determined we could and would provide that necessary care. 
• Our partnership with Maricopa County Department of Public Health led to emergency assistance which allowed us to meet this volume. 
• The Federal HRSA program covering uninsured people for COVID-related testing, vaccination, and consultation eventually became our main funding source in the late summer of 2021. 
• Once we had the funding necessary, we expanded the clinic within the IRC Welcome Center with doctors, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, testing, and support staff, almost all of whom are multilingual. 

Our clinic today

• Adapting to the situation at hand, we quickly built a first-class and one-of-a-kind medical clinic to meet the complex and often urgent medical needs of these patients welcomed into our clinic
• Each patient, in addition to a COVID-19 screening test, receives a one-on-one medical consultation with a provider where medical needs can be determined
• Each patient has access to comprehensive exams, prescriptions, specialist care coordination, and follow-up until they reach their destinations within the United States where they continue to appeal for citizenship and protection within our boarders. 
• Those with complex needs either stay in our care or we take great steps to ensure they have clinics and doctors to meet their needs, in their own language where they are headed. 
• The care we provide is much more costly than a general practice due to the immediacy of the need we see (much like an emergency room in many cases), the language and cultural barriers, and often because refugees seeking asylum through proper channels in the US are, in most cases, uniformly traumatized.