2018 Recipient

Casa de Salud

The first-ever New Mexico Funders Collaborative Communities in Action: Mental & Behavioral Health $25,000 grant was awarded to Casa de Salud to support a first-time pilot program to be undertaken in 2019 to enhance the collective ability of several key programs at Casa to provide behavioral health services to our patients and clients. Casa is a 14 year old non-profit health center in the Albuquerque South Valley that responds to patient needs for affordable primary care and addictions care in the South Valley, International District and in central NM. Over 60% of our patients are monolingual Spanish speakers. Over 80% are uninsured.

Casa began as an affordable fee for service clinic for the uninsured. Since the Affordable Care Act, we are taking increasing numbers of Medicaid patients. Casa provides integrative (east, west, natural, traditional) healing modalities in a locally funded nonprofit model. We situate ourselves within the community as a change agent, developing models for advocacy for patients and their rights to health care as part of our work. We seek to improve our ability and capacity to address critical behavioral health challenges faced by our patients and clients who otherwise come to Casa for primary and integrative care, and harm reduction and addictions recovery services. Our approach is to strengthen and better integrate the efforts of our western primary care providers, our integrative and traditional providers, our Health Apprentices, and our case management staff in order to identify and better address behavioral health concerns. This work will be additionally strengthened by increasing our collaboration with other community, academic, public and private organizations and institutions towards development of a community-wide model which can be effective in delivering comprehensive and dignified care for the people who we serve.