Free Clinic celebrates 20 years
Lynchburg News and Advance
Saturday, May 17, 2007What started as a good idea in 1987 is now a venerable mainstay of health and dental care in the Lynchburg area. The Free Clinic of Central Virginia Board has turned 20.
Wednesday’s board meeting - almost 20 years to the day to the first meeting - and the dinner that preceded it, is one of a series of special events scheduled for this anniversary year. Among those will be a Patient Celebration in September and a “Grand Gala Event” in November.
On Wednesday, guests at the board meeting included Ellen Brown, the founding board president. Brown is now director of Reynolds Homestead Continuing Education Center in Critz.
Working with the Free Clinic board “really spoiled me” said Brown, because the board was so exceptional.
Among other “first” board members at Wednesday’s meeting were the Rev. Bob Wilson, Dr. Augustus Petticolas, Anne Bishop and Jack Scudder.
The Free Clinic began in an education building at Westminster Presbyterian Church on Floyd Street, but moved into much more spacious quarters at 1016 Main St. a few years later.
Brown said she was pretty surprised when she was asked to help out in 1987, since she had no medical background. “I was just a housewife,” she said.
But one of her gifts is organizing.
“Administration is key,” said Petticolas, who noted that Ellen Brown downplays the significance of her role: “to step up, in the beginning, and say, I’ll be the go-to person, I’ll take the heat.”
Brown says it was United Way funding that helped make the opening of the clinic possible. It came at time when the United Way was completing a study of the local needs but that wasn’t complete. Yet, she said “they went out on a limb,” to help. Then, when the study was completed, said Brown, it documented the need that the Free Clinic was designed to meet.
Doctors, pharmacists, nurses, dentists were among the volunteers. Estelle Nichols of the Free Clinic in Roanoke helped point the way. After that, it was a matter of pulling those strings together, said Brown.
Now the Free Clinic has a board of more than 20 people. Executive director is Bob Barlow and board president is Kathyrn Mays.
When the clinic opened, Wilson was pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church on Floyd Street, the church that gave the clinic its first home. The church’s congregation backed the idea.
It wasn’t a hard sell. “We’d been in the service business a long time,” said Wilson. He had no doubts, after the beginning and all the hard work from many volunteers, that the clinic was here to stay.
“After that first year, I thought ‘man, there’s no way this thing is not going to go.’”
“It’s done extremely well and we have excellent facilities downtown now,” said Wilson.
Petticolas was a Lynchburg dentist who believed that in Lynchburg people cared enough to help those who needed dental care but couldn’t afford it.
Petticolas considers that the Free Clinic of Central Virginia is a measure “of the love and compassion that exists in Lynchburg, because thousands of people are receiving health care services who wouldn’t be able to obtain it” without the Free Clinic.
Barlow says that about 16,000 individuals have been served since the founding. Each year about 2,700 individuals are served.
Board members are among what Barlow estimates is about 1,000 people who volunteer each year in many capacities for the Free Clinic.
They’ve managed to get the word out.
At Wednesday’s board meeting, Barlow noted that three grants had been awarded to the clinic for use to provide medical services, including grants from the Lynchburg Rotary Club, the Central Virginia Bike Festival, and the Bedford Community Health Foundation.
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