Grassroots Health Center Goes Beyond The Minimum

The move to a $15 minimum wage may be stalled in Hartford, but not on New Haven’s Grand Avenue.

At least not at 374 Grand Ave., the mothership of one Fair Haven’s anchor institutions, the Fair Haven Community Health Center.

As of this week’s payroll, all of FHCHC’s 200-some employees are earning at least $15 an hour, reported CEO Suzanne Lagarde. She called it one of her points in her three-year tenure running the organization after working decades as a New Haven gastroenterologist.

The FHCHC’s ability to meet the goal reflects a turnaround in financial fortunes for the not-for-profit center, which teetered near bankruptcy a few years ago. Thanks to tightened financial controls, shored-up fee collections, expansion of services, and a successful push for new grant revenues, the center’s annual budget has risen from $13 million to $19 million, Lagarde said. Financial pressures remain, however — especially in light of a $600,000 cut in state funding earlier this year during the budget-balancing drama in Hartford.

A pioneer named Katrina Clark founded FHCHC in 1972 at the dawn of a grassroots health care movement that has now grown to 1,375 similar centers nationwide. Clark ran FHCHC until her retirement in 2013.

Lagarde had the unenviable task of succeeding a beloved community leader who ran an institution for more than four decades. After a life-changing experience working in a Biloxi, Miss. community clinic after Hurricane Katrina, Lagarde, who first came to town in 1975 to practice medicine, decided to leave her successful private practice to pursue a new career in social-justice health care.

“I had increasing frustration with the health care delivery system in this country,” with bureaucrats and policymakers dictating care decisions they didn’t understand, Lagarde recalled Thursday on an episode of WNHH radio’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program.

She enrolled in a mid-career Yale School of Management executive MBA program in health care to learn the business end of health care that so frustrated her as a doc. She decided to seek the opening as FHCHC’s CEO despite her familiarity with a daunting statistic: Fewer than 50 percent of people who succeed the founder of a for-profit or not-for-profit organization remain in the job after two years.

Three years later, Lagarde remains at the helm. And FHCHC has grown. It has new locations up the avenue in Fair Haven as well as in East Haven. It purchased an 18-wheel semi-truck-turned-mobile ​“Smiles 2 Go” dental lab from the old Hospital of St. Raphael to bring dental care to schoolkids. It also has launched new opioid and diabetes treatment programs. One of those has FHCHC partnering with Yale-New Haven to participate in an eight-year national study of new drug treatment for diabetes. (An estimated one-third of Latinos over 65 have Type 2 diabetes.)

Meanwhile, FHCHC has maintained its bedrock primary care for some 17,000 patients a year, most of whom have either government health insurance or no insurance. The center does a lot of that work alongside community institutions. For instance, it runs free three-night-a-week week exercise classes for both adult and child patients at Jon Martinez School. Forty FHCHC diabetes patients at a time learn how to grow and then cook organic vegetables in a program with New Haven Farms (a not-for-profit birthed by FHCHC). They get needed exercise doing the work and bring home enough produce to help feed families of five. Two weeks ago, Lagarde joined the patients at a celebratory dinner fully prepared with beets, eggplants, and other veggies grown on site.

The meal ​“tasted like it came from a four-star restaurant,” Lagarde remarked. And it was spiced with a larger mission that’s growing in Fair Haven.

Click on or download the above sound file to hear the full interview with Lagarde on WNHH radio’s ​“Dateline New Haven.”