nothin Two Helpers, Six Decades | New Haven Independent

Two Helpers, Six Decades

nancy%20and%20dog.JPGOne woman has helped parents save the lives of their drug-addicted children; another witnessed some unusual pregnancies and deliveries. The two employees from the Hill Health Center were just honored for a combined 60 years of jobs well done.

The health center honors its employees for five-year increments of service. Nancee Carpenter, the SAGA Coordinator, has worked there over 25 years basically doing the same work, though the name of the program, the funding source and her location have changed over the years.

She was hired in 1981 when the Hill Health Center began a program with the City of New Haven to provide health care to several thousand poor single people. People on city welfare were not getting preventive care,” she said. Click here to learn how that changed.

In 1997 city welfare (general assistance) was changed to SAGA, State-Administered General Assistance. Carpenter moved from one venue to another and is now based at the Medicaid office on Bassett Street.

Her day starts at 5 a.m. (after bidding farewell to her pooch), when she stops in at SCRC, a drug treatment facility in the Hill. She checks to see who has health coverage and who doesn’t and tries to help anyone who needs it. In all aspects of her job, Carpenter is a master of follow-through. I sit at the front desk at the DSS office, which is unprecedented; I don’t think anyone else in the state does what I do. I’m a liaison between the welfare office and the clients and the doctors.”

She says, showing off the ring that one of her devoted clients gave her (see photo above), that what endears her to so many people — both clients and fellow staff members — is that she answers her phone and returns others’ calls. Basically, people come to me because it’s very difficult to get state workers to answer their telephone.” Click here to hear about the Catch-22 situations she tries to resolve.

Carpenter is also one of the people taking 211 calls from all over the state, as people seek various kinds of help. She often gets calls from desperate parents about their drug-using children. Click here for a story.

doris.JPGOver at Hill Health Center’s main building on Columbus Avenue, this reporter caught up with Doris Ali Cherry just before she left work to get ready for Wednesday night’s big affair. She calls Carpenter her right hand man” when she needs follow-up on a patient.

Cherry was honored for 35 years of service. She began her work at the health center as a switchboard operator, then moved to receptionist when the switchboard was phased out. But that wasn’t what she wanted to do, so when a nursing position opened up, she applied, even though she had no nursing experience. It was something within my spirit that led me to apply, because I was giving, but I felt like I had more to give.” She was hired as a community health worker as part of an outreach team and got on-the-job training, eventually getting certified as a nurse’s aide. Click here for her praise of the Hill Health Center’s job training approach. She went part-way toward her nursing degree, but got sidetracked by life from finishing, including running a Christian bookstore and being an elder in her church.

After the outreach teams were disbanded, Cherry moved to the ob-gyn department, where she spent 18 years. Her two most memorable clients were a young woman who gave birth right at the center, on the examining table, and of an older woman who didn’t realize she was pregnant until almost the end of her pregnancy; she had thought she was post-menopausal and couldn’t get pregnant. Click here for her stories.

For the past five years, Cherry has worked with the Hill’s Homeless Program. She says the biggest thing that changed over that time is that housing has become completely out of reach for most of the people she serves. She is a case manager.

Gary Spinner, who runs the Hill Health Center and will be celebrating his own quarter-century tenure in 2009, says these two women epitomize the commitment of his employees to the mission of serving a mostly low-income, underserved population.

They know the work they are doing is having a positive impact on the lives of people in the community.” He also noted that the center has long supported continued training for its employees, such as a nursing program that’s free to staff as long as they continue working at least two years at the health center after finishing school.

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