A free clinic was one bounced check away from failure. We rebuilt the margin.

A free clinic should not be the default safety net. Increasingly, it is.

When Medicaid funding contracts, rural hospitals retreat, providers consolidate, and appointments move farther away, the need does not disappear. It lands on families, emergency rooms, and community clinics. Shalom is one of the small North State providers still offering care without first asking whether a patient can afford it.

That includes uninsured people and people who have coverage on paper but still cannot obtain or afford the care they need. Shalom’s volunteer clinicians and lay team turn community support into physical, mental, and behavioral health services with unusual reach and value.

Health access is local infrastructure.

My support for universal, single-payer health coverage is informed in part by graduate study in the economics of health administration through my MPA. Municipal economics does not stop at the clinic door. Medical access reaches housing stability, household solvency, employment, transportation, emergency response, and public budgets just as surely as streets, sewer, and transit do.

Shalom cannot repair the health-care system by itself. It can keep people from being abandoned by it. At this moment, that is extraordinary work—and work worth supporting.

The volunteers do the clinic work. We keep the back office moving.

I serve as President of Shalom Free Clinic. Krista serves as Board Secretary and carries substantial records, minutes, administrative coordination, governance follow-through, and continuity work. We are not regular clinic-floor volunteers. Shalom already has a fantastic group of medical and lay volunteers, and that is not where we are usually needed.

Our work is governance, finances, records, compliance, fundraising systems, follow-through, and the administrative continuity that lets the clinic’s volunteers concentrate on patients. I also handle IT, legal and regulatory administration, and the organization’s official administrative responses on behalf of the Board.

That does not give me individual power. I act within authority delegated by the Board; I do not replace it.

Free care, without sorting people first.

Shalom provides free primary-care interventions, health services, and education to uninsured and underinsured children, teens, and adults. Its work includes physical, mental, and behavioral health care. The clinic welcomes people across differences in identity, income, religion, ability, and family configuration.