South Minneapolis is home to a new health care clinic aimed at serving low-income and underinsured patients, replacing a Family Dollar store that was heavily damaged during the protests following the murder of George Floyd.
Southside East Lake Street clinic’s opening comes at a time when financial strife has put Minneapolis’ Hennepin County Medical Center at risk of closing and massive federal cuts are coming for Medicaid, leaving uncertain options for the city’s growing number of uninsured residents.
The clinic, part of the Southside Community Health Services organization founded in 1971, is located on the edge of the Midtown Phillips neighborhood, next door to the Midtown Global Market. Services are not free, but the clinic takes all types of insurance and offers a sliding fee discount program for people who are uninsured.
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Southside is designated as a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC), meaning it gets federal funding to provide care to underserved and low-income populations. Many of the neighborhoods surrounding the new clinic, such as Ventura Village, Midtown Phillips, Phillips West, East Phillips, Whittier and Lyndale, have higher rates of residents below the poverty level than the city average of 17%, according to the Minneapolis poverty dashboard. Midtown Phillips in particular has a poverty rate of almost 40%. The area is also home to higher percentages of residents who identify as Black, Hispanic and American Indian.
The clinic’s services include pediatric and adult primary care, midwifery, a dental office, dietetics, X-rays, mammography and behavioral health programs. Also in the works is a pharmacy and a sexual violence healing center, said Sheila Kennedy, Southside’s medical director.
“Every service line we do is intentionally designed and intentionally done to break down the barriers and make it easier for people to access health care,” Kennedy said.
In previous years, Southside provided care to 12,000 unique patients annually and booked more than 18,000 appointments, Kennedy said at a recent event at the state capitol. With the new clinic opening, she said these numbers are expected to increase to 18,000 unique patients and more than 50,000 appointments yearly.
Before the new clinic opened, Southside operated out of two separate locations – a dental office and a medical facility – about a mile apart, said executive director Ann Cazaban. The dental clinic is still open, but the medical office closed in favor of Southside East Lake Street, offering a wider array of services.
“This was really our vision of trying to build a facility that allowed for us to do the integrated care that we want to do for our patients,” Cazaban said.
More than $30 million in grant funding, private investments and individual donations went into the opening, Cazaban said, including $2.6 million from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, whose ex-husband, Jeff Bezos, founded Amazon. The clinic also receives $3.5 million a year from the federal government for being a FQHC as well as funding from the Minnesota Department of Health and Delta Dental of Minnesota Foundation.
David Ingold, executive director of the Midtown and East Phillips Neighborhood Association, said in an email that the clinic’s new location off Lake Street “is both closer to the thousands of immigrants, refugees, and low-income residents that live in the Phillips neighborhoods, and it is close to the updated rapid Metro Transit lines on Chicago (Avenue) and Lake Street.”
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Minneapolis City Council member Jason Chavez (Ward 9) told MinnPost that the clinic’s location, taking the place of the Family Dollar, marks an important step for the neighborhood and the city at large.
“We still need to center the police brutality (and) structural racism that has plagued that community, while also knowing that we must continue to address the health inequities that impact our community in general,” Chavez said. “… This project in particular is going to be able to address many of the issues that our neighbors are dealing with.”
Cazaban and Kennedy said that so far, the clinic has received positive feedback from patients and neighborhood residents.
“We are so thrilled, and especially on that corner on Lake Street where we’ve had so much,” Kennedy said. “Minneapolis has just seen too much. We have been through too much.”
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