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April 5th, 2005 - Annual Report - Saint Luke's Foundation of Cleveland, Ohio

Care Alliance Project: The New St.Clair Avenue Health Clinic.
A new home to better help people who are homeless.

Care Alliance patient Rases Redd is now back on his feet and looking for more permanent housing.

What makes Care Alliance’s new medical center so exciting isn’t just the advanced diagnostic and dental technology they now have to provide better healthcare to people who are homeless. Or the state-of-the-art procedure and exam tables. Or the fact that their new modern, spacious, healing environment was designed by nationally recognized architect Malcolm Cutting, Sandra Waller of Halcyon Design, Inc., and Care Alliance’s CEO, Linda Somers.

“We’re just happy to have running water in our exam rooms,” smiled Somers. “That alone is big to us.”

Somers is more than grateful for Care Alliance’s new home on St. Clair Avenue. Made possible, thanks to highly successful fundraising efforts that over the past 18 months have helped turn an old historic warehouse into a modern, well-equipped ambulatory care center. A clinic that enables this 20-year-old organization’s 40-plus employees to carry out their mission and treat more patients in need with more than just the best healthcare.

“It’s about giving people respect and dignity,” explained Dr. Feyisayo Adeyina, Care Alliance medical director. “We’re not helping ‘the homeless.’ That isn’t what defines them. We’re helping people who happen to be homeless at the moment.”

A Care Alliance patient gets blood testing done in one of the new exam rooms.

With “moment” being the key word, since Care Alliance expects to not only provide affordable medical care to a projected 6,500 patients this year, up 1,500 from last year, but to actually help these people get off the street. And get their lives back in order.

“Think of what that is worth,” explained Somers. “To take a person who is poor or homeless, or just served time in the prison system, and help them get healthy, which enables them to get a job and become stable and then actually gives back to the community. To me these are like miracle stories.”

Stories like Fred, who was homeless, a drug addict, and a diabetic, but now has a job, a home, his diabetes and drug addiction under control, and who now volunteers at Care Alliance’s diabetes center three days a week. To see what a huge impact Care Alliance has made in our community, all you need to do is see Fred grin.

“This million-dollar smile I have isn’t mine,” said Fred as a guest speaker at a Care Alliance dental center grand opening. “Care Alliance gave this to me. And I can’t be more grateful. And I can’t stop smiling.”