Breathing room for health center
The acutely cramped but much-used Brockton Neighborhood Health Center has received long-awaited financing to build a larger facility on Main Street. Groundbreaking is scheduled for this spring, with hopes of opening the clinic by summer 2007.
Executive director Sue Joss said the health center has long outgrown its space. Adult patients are no longer accepted for dental appointments because of a five-month waiting list. The facility's staff use every inch of space, rearranging furniture and tucking photocopying machines under stairwells. And the waiting areas get so full that sometimes patients choose to wait outside on the sidewalk, she said.
''There are days you literally can't find a place to sit in the waiting room," said Joss. ''We've reached a point where we can't help patients who need us."
But it should be a different scene next year.
Last Wednesday city officials joined Joss to accept a $1.5 million federal grant toward construction of a $16.3 million clinic at 63 Main St. The health center has also received a $1 million gift from the Goddard Health Foundation.
''This is huge as far as what it means to our patients," said Joss. ''We're so out of space."
The neighborhood clinic has a diverse clientele that includes African-Americans, Brazilians, Cape Verdeans, Haitians, Portuguese, and Latinos. It serves 12,000 patients and had approximately 60,000 visits last year, said Joss.
The Brockton Neighborhood Health Center has come a long way since the early 1990s, when it began offering medical services from a mobile van in a church parking lot. Soon after it was incorporated in 1992, the nonprofit ran into opposition from some city officials, who questioned whether a health clinic was needed downtown. Some feared such a facility would attract drug addicts to the area.
After fighting for nearly three years, Brockton Neighborhood Health Center Inc. won approval to open a permanent, 10,000-square-foot clinic on Main Street in November 1994.
Since then, the center has added a family medical practice on Pleasant Street, a dental office and administrative offices at 231 Main St., and a satellite clinic at a homeless shelter.
Finding funding to expand has been difficult, and it wasn't too long ago that the federal grant money seemed lost. In June 2004, the health center's application was denied.
''We got a letter saying our proposal had no merit. It was a pretty crushing letter," said Joss. ''We couldn't afford to take no for an answer."
With nothing to lose, Joss and then-Mayor John T. Yunits Jr. traveled to the Economic Development Administration's offices in Philadelphia, in an effort to persuade federal officials otherwise. Ultimately, their lobbying worked.
The federal grant, along with the Goddard Health Foundation's donation, was the ''final piece in the puzzle," said Joss. (A bank has agreed to lend $12.5 million, and the center has pledges of $4.1 million, including the grants. Joss said the number is slightly higher than the project cost of $16.3 million because some of the pledged money will be distributed over several years.)
Brockton Neighborhood Health Center's search for new space began four years ago. In May 2003, it bought a vacant lot at 63 Main St., the former site of a department store that had been demolished.
The new building will allow the health center to consolidate three of its sites. Monitor Builders Inc., a Boston-based construction firm, will head the project.
The facility will be five stories high and will occupy some 58,000 square feet. The ground floor will be leased to a pharmacy. According to health center officials, the new clinic will double the health center's capacity to serve patients in Brockton and surrounding communities.
For information on how to contribute to the Brockton Neighborhood Health Center capital campaign, call 508-894-3506.
Emily Sweeney can be reached at esweeney@globe.com. 
