Columnists :: Nonprofit Sector
Children’s grant funding coming for South End Community Health Center
by Emily Cataneo
MySouthEnd.com Contributor
Wednesday Nov 18, 2009
The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently awarded the South End Community Health Center, 1601 Washington Street, more than $300,000 in grants to promote children’s health insurance by locating uninsured children who are eligible for coverage under Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
Along with 68 other grantees, the South End Community Health Center attended the National Children’s Health Insurance Summit in Chicago from Nov. 4 to 6 to discuss best practice strategies for using the grant money to locate and enroll uninsured children. At the conference, members of the organizations networked with healthcare experts and officials and attended panels about topics such as "Every nook and cranny: outreach in rural areas" and "Reaching diverse communities: it’s more than just speaking a language."
Mary Kahn, Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Press Officer at the Center of Medicare and Medicaid Services, called the conference an "idea and information exchange."
"The point of the conference was to bring together people from across the country, some of whom had received grants from the department, and some advocates for children’s health, to exchange ideas about projects they had undertaken that had been successful in enrolling children in Medicare and CHIP," said Kahn.
At the conference, US Department of Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius spoke about the importance of insuring children.
"As a society and as parents, we have no greater responsibility than to provide quality health care for our children," she said.
Altogether, the organizations at the summit received $40 million in grants. This funding was made possible by the Children’s Health Insurance Reauthorization Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law on Feb. 4, and which will fund CHIP for the next four years.
The South End Community Health Center was not the only local institution in attendance at the summit. Health Care for All, Inc., a Massachusetts-based group that seeks to provide universal healthcare, was awarded more than $400,000. Health Care for All will use the money to collaborate with ethnic media organizations and faith-based groups in finding uninsured children. The South End Community Health Center, whose patients are already 61 percent Latino, will target that demographic by training bilingual community members to find and enroll children. The center, which caters to over 1,000 homeless people, will also target the South End’s homeless population.
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