WORTHINGTON — New grant money is going to support Hilltown Community Health Center in its work to secure and maintain access to health coverage for people in need.
The $60,000 grant from the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation will help the health center carry out its plans to connect marginalized populations such as migrants and the homeless with health insurance coverage.
“It’s a big help,” Kim Savery, director of community programs and family support at the Hilltown Health Center, said of the grant. “This allows me to dedicate health workers to this project.”
Savery said the organization has seen new challenges emerge around health care access. These sometimes involve recent immigrants for whom language is a barrier.
A community health assessment and discussions with schools and other community groups provided some statistics.
“We found we have first-generation residents from 36 countries in our service area,” Savery said. That area encompasses Amherst and Northampton as well as the hill towns of Hampshire County.
The organization has some help in its efforts to work on multilingual health access, Savery said, with Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking workers, a Russian “extern,” a qualified nurse practitioner in her home country who also speaks Ukrainian and a French-speaking intern who went with a team to Hadley to meet with the most recent influx of Haitian migrants staying at the Knights Inn.
The Hilltown Health Center, with its long-standing connection to Gateway Regional School, is looking to strengthen collaborations with schools, Savery said. One project involves sending a community health worker and a health access worker into the Abner Gibbs Elementary School in Westfield, which has a substantial population of non-English speakers.
“We’ve been talking about these things, planning for them, but we haven’t had the resources until now,” Savery said.
The health center also works with Manna in Northampton to connect homeless people to health services.
The foundation, a nonprofit grantmaking and research organization, notes that “the unwinding of the pandemic-era continuous coverage requirement and subsequent MassHealth redetermination process” are putting additional strain on the ideal of universal health coverage in Massachusetts.
That process, under which all those enrolled in Medicaid have to prove they’re still eligible for the government health program, is another task the Hilltown Health Center has to complete.
“We’re doing our best to make sure people retain their health insurance,” Savery said.
While the foundation grant may not be a recurring source of income, she said the health center tries to foster a network of support.
“We see this as laying the groundwork for collaboration,” she said. “We’re showing our commitment to creating a solution here.”
The Foundation awarded a total of $600,000 to 10 community-based organizations located across the state.
James Pentland can be reached at jpentland@gazettenet.com.