Boston Children's Community Mission | Boston Children’s Celebrates National Health Center Week (Aug. 4-10)

Every year, the National Association of Community Health Centers sponsors this week to recognize community health centers and to celebrate all the staff, volunteers, and supporters that make their continued operations possible. Boston Children’s is proud to partner with and support 13 community health centers in Boston. Read on to learn more about these health centers and how the hospital partners with them.

Boston Children’s is proud to own and operate the Martha Eliot Health Center. Founded in 1967 and located in Jamaica Plain, Boston Children’s at Martha Eliot provides primary and preventive care for children, adolescents, and young adults. The site also offers family planning services and information about sexual health.

There are a range of specialty services available to families including behavioral health and optometry services. An Early Intervention program is for infants and toddlers younger than 3 years old with developmental delays or are at risk of a developmental delay. Free COVID tests and vaccine clinics are provided for patients. Staff are fluent in English, Spanish, and French Creole, with onsite interpreter services as well. Martha Eliot offers $2 bags of fresh produce every other Thursday to patients and nearby residents through Fair Foods and is right next to the Boston Children’s food pantry.

Martha Eliot also plans a special health and wellness carnival every fall for children and families to get health information, meet staff, and participate in other fun activities. This year the fair is scheduled to take place on Saturday, Sept. 19.

Boston Community Pediatrics, established in 2020, is the first nonprofit pediatric private practice that provides behavioral health and primary care. Auntie Jane’s Closet is a store that is free for patients to shop for new or like-new clothing for children of all ages, essential baby items, toys, and games. They work to achieve accessibility through community partnerships, specialized care, food access, transportation assistance, and telehealth visits. They also run the Group Well Child Program to reduce social isolation, provide care navigation support, address mental health concerns, and encourage healthy parent-child relationships with programs for new mothers and their babies.

Boston Community Pediatrics is a Boston Children’s Healthy in the City partner site. The center provides cooking classes, dance, a reading group, yoga, and a Girls on the Run group.

Bowdoin Street Health Center, established in 1972, is a multicultural and multilingual health center, licensed by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The center offers a full range of services, including physical therapy, diabetes care, group medical visits, depression screenings, and home visits. It also provides an on-site pharmacy for patients.

Bowdoin Street is a partner site in Boston Children’s Healthy in the City program. This community-based program aims to provide Boston families with the tools and resources needed to lead active and healthy lives.

Bowdoin Street offers many free or low-cost services at its Wellness Center, which has two exercise rooms and a demonstration kitchen. Programs include fitness classes (Taekwondo, yoga, Tai Chi, dance, basketball, Afro beats, indoor tennis), cooking classes, and gardening workshops through their Healthy Champions community gardening program. Food access is also provided through Food RX, Fresh Truck, and Farmers Markets.

Brookside Community Health Center, established in 1970 and located in Jamaica Plain, is one of two health centers licensed by Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The center offers a variety of services, including chronic disease management, social services, and exceptional strength in its dental department, from bilingual (English and Spanish) medical professionals and providers. Staff from the center also run five WIC programs across the city, offering benefits for mothers and young children such as supplemental food, breastfeeding education, midwifery, and peer counselor support. In response to the social determinants of health needs among their patient population, Brookside hired two Community Resource Specialists (CRSs) to further improve their support for patients.

Brookside is also a partner site in Boston Children’s Healthy in the City Program.

Brookside offers cooking classes, nutrition education workshops, and food access resources.

Charles River Community Health, established in 1974, serves the Allston-Brighton and Waltham communities with two locations. It aims to ensure everyone has access to various programs, including the MassHealth ACO, telehealth visits, vaccine clinics, and a back-to-school clinic.  Screening services are available for depression, breast, and cervical cancer. Charles River also provides mental health services and family planning and an on-site pharmacy for patients.

Charles River is a partner site in Boston Children’s Healthy in the City Program.

Charles River meets with families and connects them to community resources such as their biweekly mobile market and family cooking classes.

The Dimock Center was the first hospital in New England opened by women for women. Located on nine acres of Roxbury, the health center is dedicated to addressing the community's physical, developmental, and behavioral needs. The center offers a range of health services, Early Head Start, and Heart Start programs, and provides comprehensive education and family support. Dimock launched Clinical Stabilization Services and Dimock's Restoring Hope Campaign last year to provide post-detox treatment beds for men in Boston. Dimock also provides an on-site CVS Pharmacy for patients and an emergency shelter program.

Dimock Center is a partner site in Boston Children’s Healthy in the City.

Dimock provides nutrition counseling and case management as well as mobile markets and interactive cooking demos with a mobile kitchen.

East Boston Neighborhood Health Center, established in 1970, is the only health center in New England providing continuous care 24/7. It is now part of NeighborHealth, which includes South End Community Health Center. The center offers specialty care in pulmonology, endocrinology, and sports medicine. Project SHINE is a multidisciplinary HIV services program. With an emphasis on accessibility, telemedicine, hearing evaluations, an adolescent clinic, and vaccination clinics are offered. It also provides recovery services, which assist people with drug use disorders to return to their everyday lives, and a variety of programs, which prevent violence. It also offers patients on-site radiology, pharmacy, and vision center service.

East Boston Neighborhood Health Center is a partner site in Boston Children’s Healthy in the City program.

The center works closely with patients and their parents make healthier lifestyle choices. The health center offers programs such as CATCH, for children with serious health care needs, and Let’s Get Movin’, which works to build young people’s healthy habits. 

Mattapan Community Health Center, founded in 1972, provides health care services for all ages. The center serves more than 90 percent of the minority and immigrant population in Mattapan and a large Haitian community, providing primary care and preventative health services. The center also provides cancer and cholesterol screenings, immunizations, chronic disease care, walk-in care for urgent problems, mammography, and an HIV/AIDS counseling and testing program. The Boston Healthy Start Initiative helps women of color with children under the age of 2 through health assessment, support, and care of the family until the child reaches 24 months. It also collaborates with the Young Achievers School to offer a school-based health center.

Mattapan is a Boston Children’s Healthy in the City partner site. Mattapan offers fitness classes and cooking classes that engage children and families.

South Cove Community Health Center has five locations, but Boston Children’s primarily partners with the Chinatown location. Founded in 1972, South Cove has become the largest Asian primary care provider in Massachusetts through high quality, community-based health care and health promotion programs. Most health care staff and providers are bilingual in some dialects of Chinese (such as Mandarin and Taiwanese) and English. South Cove provides family planning and mammography. The large pediatric population at the clinic can access their tuberculosis clinic, thalassemia screening clinic, and asthma/pulmonary clinic.

The South End Community Health Center was founded in 1969. In 2020, it merged with East Boston Neighborhood Health Center under NeighborHealth to provide comprehensive healthcare. The center operates the Dr. Gerald Hass Center, Boston's first full-time elementary school-based health center. Services include vaccination clinics, telemedicine, addiction treatment, midwifery, and neurology. The center also specializes in pediatric asthma/pulmonology and pediatric dermatology. South End offers innovative programs like wellness, cooking classes, earned income tax clinics, and WIC. South End launched New England’s first combined residency in family medicine and psychiatry with Boston Medical Center in 2018.

South End is a Boston Children’s Healthy in the City partner site. South End offers a Pediatric Wellness Program, which includes collaborations with many organizations like Fresh Truck, Cooking Matters, the Blackstone Community Health Center, Boston Bikes, and Playworks.

Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center is licensed by Brigham and Women’s Hospital, allowing it to offer a full spectrum of services. It provides podiatry, cardiology, nephrology, nutrition, gynecology, midwifery, psychotherapy, and psychopharmacology services. The center operates the South Street Youth Center (SSYC) with a mission to provide a safe, educational, and engaging space during out-of-school time for young residents of the South Street housing development. Additionally, the center has a program called Nuestra Generación in Spanish, translated to Our Generation in English, for patients who are at least 60 years old. Participants in the program have a chance to enjoy weekly social luncheons and other Health Promotion Center initiatives such as Senior Fitness.

Southern Jamaica Plain is a Boston Children’s Healthy in the City partner site. Southern Jamaica Plain offers a wide range of programming and resources such as Zumba classes, cooking classes, and food distribution, especially for the South Street housing development and Jamaica Plain community.

Upham’s Community Care offers a variety of services and is the only Boston health center to offer a Home Health Care/Visiting Nurse program, which has served thousands of Boston residents. The program aims to allow loved ones to return home sooner, remain in their homes longer, and help prevent hospital re-admissions. Services include family medicine, women’s health, behavioral health, dental and eye care, pediatrics, nutrition, home care, elder care, urgent care, and WIC. Attention to youth is also shown through after-school childcare, youth development, and violence prevention programs for youth ages 5 to 22. Upham’s Community Care also has an onsite pharmacy.

Upham’s is Boston Children’s Healthy in the City partner site. Upham’s patients can access cooking experience and an opportunity to help design, plant, tend, and harvest vegetables in the raised-bed vegetable garden on site at the clinic.

Whittier Street Health Center, founded in 1993, provides pediatric services include eye and oral care and a walk-in clinic. The center offers many community health programs, including DecisionArts. This therapy program teaches pre-adolescent and adolescent girls who have experienced violence about processing and expressing feelings, with an emphasis on making healthy choices. Another program is the Prison Release/Re-Entry Program, which helps men and women returning home from incarceration gain access to benefits such as primary care, referrals to housing, and workforce development. The health center also has a mobile health van service with a fleet of four vans, making care more accessible to everyone. Medication access is offered through an on-site pharmacy that also provides medication therapy management and free delivery.