White Bird Clinic Celebrates Fifty Years with Major Expansion
In 1969, a group of student activists and concerned practitioners founded White Bird Clinic to provide crisis services and free medical care to counter-culture youth in Eugene. Having grown continuously for fifty years, White Bird now has ten programs, 200 staff members, and more than 400 volunteers.
To celebrate our fiftieth, we’re growing our programs, demonstrating our commitment to serving low income, under-resourced community members. In response to burgeoning community need, White Bird is expanding medical, dental, crisis, and CAHOOTS services.
White Bird has a fifty-year track record of identifying, assessing, and responding to community need by leveraging our existing resources. We respond rapidly and effectively by building on existing, successful programs. Our expansion consists of:
- Opening a new medical walk-in clinic for individuals who are low-income and/or homeless and uninsured. The clinic, below the existing primary care clinic, will provide an alternative for patients experiencing an acute issue who lack health insurance, diverting a great number of emergency room visits.
- Enlarging the dental program to increase its capacity to serve patients by nearly 75%. White Bird is renovating the building at 1415 Pearl St. into a clinic that will also provide denture care for elderly patients and serve more children and families.
- Increasing access to crisis services by moving the crisis program to 990 W 7th Ave., adjacent to the Whitaker neighborhood. The new crisis center will house the 24/7 crisis line phone service as well as walk-in services in a trauma-informed space intended to minimize environmental triggers that may be re-traumatizing.
- Expanding the hours and geographic coverage of CAHOOTS mobile crisis services, which responded to over 21,000 calls in 2018, saving an estimated $6M in emergency medical services costs alone.
In order to serve more folks in need, White Bird is taking a risk by growing many different programs at once, and we’re turning to the community for support and partnership. Please call 541.342.8255 or donate to support the project of your choice.
