The first Health Center in the nation opened as an Office of Economic Opportunity project at Columbia Point, Boston in December of 1965. In the early 1960s, the poverty rate in the United States approached 19 percent. Populations disproportionately affected by poverty were Black Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans and individuals and families living in Urban and Rural Communities.
The Model Cities federal program stimulated 24 consumer-led Health Committees that began to plan for a system of Neighborhood Health Centers across Boston. This federal initiative to fight the War on Poverty was led by President Johnson in his attempt to foster anti-poverty, social empowerment programs to mitigate the complex roots of poverty and to combat racial injustice. On November 15, 1971, health committees, healthcare administrators, and public officials assembled at a public health conference at Northeastern University. At the conference, attendees recommended that a permanent association of neighborhood health centers be formed. In 1972, the Massachusetts League of Neighborhood Health Centers was founded in 1972 as one of the first state Primary Care Associations (PCAs) in the country. It would later be renamed to the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers. As such, the League is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization registered as a public charity with the Commonwealth's Secretary of State, and maintains a professional staff at its headquarters in Boston and at its training center in Worcester.
Throughout the years, the League has grown and evolved. Since its inception, the League has transcended Boston and has expanded regionally and statewide. Its steady growth is attributed to funding diversification, strategic planning, and disciplined alignment of member needs with available resources. From 1990 to present day, the primary focus of the League has been the expansion of primary care practice sites throughout Massachusetts and to strengthen partnerships with academia, philanthropy, and state agencies to expand oral health, behavioral health, and eye care services to a statewide level. In Massachusetts, community health centers are the largest primary care network in the state. Today, the League encompasses 52 health center organizations with 300+ community health center sites. Health centers serve one million patients statewide, whom reside in 96% of the state’s cities and towns. They have also added more than 400,000 patients since the start of state health reform in 2006.
Continually, the League serves as an information source on community-based health care to policymakers, opinion leaders and the media, and provides a wide range of technical assistance to health centers and communities, including: Workforce Development initiatives, Analysis of state and federal health regulatory and policy that affect health centers, Information Technology Development, management of and support for Clinical Quality initiatives to improve and better integrate patient care, Training and Education for health center administrators, clinicians, and board members, and Support to Expand Health Access through work with state leaders and local health and advocacy organizations that seek to open health centers in their communities.
As an undaunted leader and innovator in healthcare, the League has always strived to progress and to expand. The League’s James W. Hunt, Jr. Training & Learning Center (TLC) opened in January 2018. The leased space is intended to provide community health centers with access to modern meeting space and upgraded teleconferencing technology. Since its launch, the TLC has hosted 171 events with just over 5,000 attendees. 116 of these trainings have been League-sponsored or community-based events.
The League also oversees two programs. The first is the Massachusetts' Health Center Controlled Network (HCCN), which is a federal Health Resources and Services Administration-funded initiative to assist 36 health centers in better leveraging health information technology for improving health access, enhancing quality of care, and achieving cost efficiencies through practice redesign. Also, the Connecticut River Valley Farmworker Health Program (CRVFHP) is a voucher program funded under Section 330 (g) of the Public Health Service Act that enables qualified migrant and seasonal agricultural workers and their families to receive a limited set of health services from a network of participating Massachusetts and Connecticut health care providers based in the Connecticut River Valley. Additionally, the League is the founder and partner of: Capital Link, CommonWealth Purchasing Group, and the Massachusetts Association for Community Health (MACH)
