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Boulder County Nonprofits Need Your Support
Learn about the difficulties facing local safety net organizations that provide health care, shelter, food assistance, and more to minoritized and under-resourced communities.
On Thursday, October 31st, Clinica Family Health & Wellness hosted a press conference organized by the Boulder County Family Resource Network (FRN) at our Lafayette Clinic. The Boulder County FRN consists of dozens of nonprofit organizations from across Boulder County, as well as schools and county and city government partners, all focusing on working together to improve supports and systems for local families.
Our President & CEO, Simon Smith, was joined by leaders from several peer organizations – including OUR Center, Sister Carmen Community Center, Emergency Family Assistance Association (EFAA), El Centro Amistad, Nederland Food Pantry, and Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence (SPAN) - to emphasize the significant and unprecedented challenges safety net providers like us now face.
I have led Clinica as CEO for the past 11 years, and in all my years of work, I have never experienced a period as challenging as the one we now face. The health care safety net is facing a particularly complex storm of challenges,” said Simon.
Despite seeing a steady increase in demand for services, local nonprofits like Clinica Family Health & Wellness are experiencing deep cuts in public funding. In response, these organizations are being forced to make difficult decisions about services and operations that threaten to jeopardize critical safety net services such as medical and mental health care, rental assistance, food pantries, childcare, and more.
Caption: Simon Smith, President & CEO of Clinica Family Health & Wellness, speaking during the press conference about the challenges facing Boulder County’s safety net organizations. Behind him stands representatives from other local nonprofits that make up Boulder County’s Family Resource Network (FRN).
How did we get here?
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Medicaid disenrollments were paused. This ensured that more people had access to the services they needed during this challenging period. However, from spring 2023 to 2024, everyone was required to re-enroll in Medicaid to continue receiving coverage.
Sadly, this process was complicated and cumbersome, and as a result many more individuals lost their coverage than was anticipated or projected. In fact, in Colorado proportionally more people have lost their Medicaid insurance than all but one other state in the country.
According to Simon:
This Medicaid ‘unwind’ has impacted hundreds of thousands of Coloradans, and disenrollment has been on a scale larger than anyone projected or anticipated. This means over the past year, people are losing health insurance coverage, and safety net providers are losing reimbursement funding even as the cost of care and inflation make it harder to remain competitive.”
At Clinica alone, this unwind has had profound impacts on our patients and clients – as this data shows:
- Today, roughly 43% of the over 60,000 medical patients we serve are uninsured, with only 37.5% remaining covered by Medicaid.
- This represents an 8.2% drop in Medicaid and a 5.9% rise in the uninsured from pre-pandemic levels, matching levels we last saw over a decade ago (pre-Obamacare expansion).
- It appears that over 70% of our clients who have lost their Medicaid coverage are now uninsured. That is thousands and thousands and thousands of newly uninsured patients within our organization and many more across our community.
Caption: Marc Cowell, Director of the Outreach United Resource (OUR) Center and Chair of the Boulder County Family Resource Network highlights what concerned community members can do to support our local social safety net.
What can you do?
At the press conference, the Family Resource Network shared actionable steps that concerned community members can take to support Boulder County’s social safety net:
Donate
As other funding sources (including COVID-19 relief funds) get cut or reduced and budgets get stretched, donating directly to safety net organizations is a valuable way to financially support the essential services they provide to your community. If you’d like to support Clinica Family Health & Wellness this giving season, we invite you to visit our Donate page.
Volunteer
If able, we also encourage you to donate your precious time to support the services and causes that are particularly important to you.
Be informed
Stay updated on news and information from local safety net organizations and your county’s Health & Human Services department. For starters, read more news coverage about this issue on the Longmont Times-Call and Boulder Reporting Lab. For updates directly from Clinica Family Health & Wellness in your inbox, we invite you to subscribe to our monthly Community Update e-newsletter by entering your email address below in the site footer.
Advocate
Lastly, help us spread awareness of this situation by talking about it with your elected officials and social circles. The more people who help sound the alarm about the challenges these organizations face, the greater voice we have to collectively advocate for funding our safety net at this critical time.
As always, thank you for your continued support. Clinica Family Health & Wellness and other local safety net organizations greatly depend on direct contributions from the communities we serve.
The safety net system, like the health of the people we serve, is fragile. Health insurance status may change, but the needs of the human being do not. They still need and deserve our care,” said Simon. “Our community does best when we make sure that all its members are supported.”
Caption: Members of the Family Resource Network, representing various local safety net nonprofit organizations, stand united to advocate for increased support for health and wellness services in Boulder County.