Casa de Salud: Healthcare and Healing with Dignity and Care

Casa de Salud is organizing this fundraiser to benefit Justice, Access, Support & Solutions for Health.

Tax deductible

(Photo above: Several Casa de Salud team members).

Friends of Casa de Salud,

As we enter 2025, we’d like to share a bit about how we understand our work inside the rapidly changing landscape of access to care. As the world around us continues to reveal the deep cracks and fissures at both the root and at the surface of our nation, the kind of local and direct care that Casa de Salud provides is more necessary now than ever. A majority of our patients are uninsured, most of the rest of our patients are on Medicaid. In addition, many of our patients are from communities that have been under attack or are coming under attack in the coming months, and we are steadfast in our dedication to provide important care for all of us.

We do this work independently, as a nonprofit organization that is not a federally qualified health center and does not receive federal funding for our work. Because of this independence, we are well and uniquely situated to keep powerfully serving our community even as the larger scope of care in our nation is poised to be weakened even further. And, we need your help to keep doing the ground-breaking and dignified work we do of providing fair-priced and accessible care, healthcare advocacy, all while sustaining and growing our staff of employees with generous benefits.

At Casa de Salud, we fiercely believe:

That healthcare is a right.
That anti-racist care, harm reduction, and cultural humility are guiding values.
That true access to care means affordable, trusted, dignified care.
That healing goes beyond healthcare.
That healthcare has a responsibility to build power with community.
And that health worker voices - in solidarity with community voices - are powerful.

“Casa de Salud is one of the most adventurous attempts to make healthcare genuinely for the people.”

- Dr Pritpal Tamber

Casa de Salud’s model of care lifts up and centers primary care for immigrants, low-income and uninsured New Mexicans, queer/transgender community members, drug users, and people seeking recovery and treatment for addictions. We see healthcare from a lens that understands histories of inequalities, oppressions, and structural forces. We see the strengths of our community members, as well as the cultural richness that exists around us. It is with this historical analysis and appreciation for the power within our community that we build towards collective wellness and liberation. We situate ourselves in the community, developing models for advocacy for patients and organizing for health rights.

Below are a few highlights of this past year, in service to our community:

Patients Served, Lives Touched

Over 7500 visits for a range of services at Casa de Salud - including:

Comprehensive primary care healthcare
Same-day walk-in acute care
Dignified and comprehensive treatment of opioid use disorder
Harm reduction services (syringe exchange, overdose education and narcan distribution)
Care of our gender expansive community including gender affirming hormone therapy for queer, nonbinary and transgender New Mexicans.
Case management services, provided by our growing case management team
Point of care support (with vaccines, rapid Hep C and syphilis tests, and more)
We continue building a dignified continuum of care from jail to primary care – for people being released from Metropolitan Detention Center, the county jail in Albuquerque

The Casa de Salud family is growing

Two new directors have joined our leadership team! Our new Director of Growth and Strategy, Michelle Melendez, MPA, has over two decades of expertise in community healthcare, organizing, and nonprofit and government leadership. In her most recent roles, she served as the Director of the EleValle South Valley Health Communities Collaborative, and as the inaugural Director of the City of Albuquerque’s Office of Equity and Inclusion.
Our new Director of Operations, Janet Leung, has extensive experience working with organizations to improve their operations and efficiency. She previously worked at Fresenius as a Senior Business Analyst for Group Operations, where she traveled to clinics in six Western US states to support clinical teams. And most recently, she was the Director of Business Development at UNM Hospital.
We are grateful for the leadership and dedication of our former Director of Operations, Elizabeth Boyce, who has tirelessly helped Casa de Salud grow and thrive for years.
Our unique, community-based Reimagining Healthcare and Healing Clinician Fellowship is in its second year, and we are excited to have Dr Cynthia Sanchez as our current fellow. Learn more about our fellowship, we are recruiting for our third year of the fellowship!
We hired a Clinic Flow Coordinator, Jehu Soto (a former health apprentice fellow!); promoted current staff to the roles of Senior Clinic Flow Coordinator (Fabian Corral) and Medical Scheduler (Diana Medrano); hired our second nurse, Jon Helm, and hired for a new position of Program Manager for Reentry Care and Case Management Services (Delfino Rubi), and a new Pathways Navigator case manager (Chanel Herrerra). Learn about open positions here.
In 2024, we also trained six new Health Apprentice Fellows, to join six current fellows, in our rigorous, service-oriented and nationally recognized workforce development program - Casa de Salud’s Health Apprentice Fellowship. As our fellows complete their year with us, they will join over 350 alumni of the Health Apprentice Fellowship network from Casa de Salud - many of whom are health and healthcare leaders in New Mexico and beyond. Learn more about the Health Apprentice Fellowship!
We expanded partnerships with the City of Albuquerque, Bernalillo County, and the NM Department of Health; with local and national foundations, and with community partner organizations. We are grateful to Community Catalyst, Foundation for Opioid Response Efforts, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Con Alma Health Foundation, NewMexicoWomen.org, the Elevate Initiative, Albuquerque Community Foundation, Santa Fe Community Foundation’s Envision Fund, St Anthony’s Foundation, and the McCune Charitable Foundation, among others, for support for programs and operations.

We are Impacting New Mexico beyond our Albuquerque clinic

Big announcement! We are building our second Casa de Salud clinic! We will soon be opening in Los Lunas in nearby more rural Valencia County, with support from the statewide Rural Healthcare Development Fund. We are excited to expand our important model of care to more New Mexicans. We will be hiring for a number of new positions!
We partnered with first responders to support people immediately after opioid overdoses. Through a creative and life-saving new initiative with the NM Dept of Health, first responders can now offer medication for addiction treatment to people right after reversing their overdose, and interested patients can then be transported directly to partnering sites. Casa de Salud is the only partner site that is also a primary care clinic, and we are excited to support community members with dignified care and with medications for addiction treatment.
We (Casa de Salud and our VIDA Health Leaders Network) are excited about Medicaid Forward – an innovative and cost-effective approach that allows people making above the qualifying income for Medicaid, to buy into Medicaid. Medicaid Forward would extend affordable comprehensive health insurance to most New Mexicans under 65. We serve on the steering committee of the New Mexico Together for Healthcare campaign and our team recently spoke at the NM Legislative Health and Human Services Committee meeting, and the story landed on the front page of the ABQ Journal: "Overwhelming support for Medicaid Forward will lead to bill in upcoming legislative session“
We continue to grow our VIDA Health Leaders Network of over 150 health workers and community members from around the state, and are excited to build community together and organize together around our focus areas of focus areas of 1) Healthcare access, 2) Addictions, and 3) Community Safety. If you’re interested in joining, click here.

Now in our 20th year, we will continue all of our work above, expand care beyond our South Valley location, keep growing our staff with new positions, continue to serve uninsured individuals and families in New Mexico, and build out creative innovations in care for our uninsured patients and patients with Medicaid. We will continue working to transform care locally and statewide, while building power with community and among health workers.

Help preserve independent neighborhood based, accessible community rooted healthcare that is relational and that works to provide high quality care to those most in need, while building power to transform the structural determinants of health and the larger ecosystem of care.

Please consider a donation to Casa de Salud. The Casa team spirit is so beautiful, our team members work nimbly, creatively, and with so much love for our community. We do this work with so much resourcefulness towards finding sustainable, diverse approaches to funding – and with little overhead. Your support will go a long way towards this goal, for the year ahead.

If you would like to instead send a check, our address is Casa de Salud, 1608 Isleta Blvd SW, Albuquerque NM 87105. If you'd like to talk to a team member about making a larger donation, please connect with us!

Do you have other ideas or suggestions? We want to hear from you!

And please help us get the word out about our services and care, open positions and growth, and this fundraising campaign, too: follow us on social media (Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter/X) and amplify our message there too!

With gratitude – and in solidarity with health workers and marginalized communities in the US, and internationally,

-- The Casa de Salud team

Casa de Salud ofrenda for Dia de los Muertos.

Alejandra Casarrubias RN, Clinical Manager at Casa de Salud and national Bloomberg Fellow, at the Bloomberg American Health Summit, Baltimore MD, Nov 2023.

New Mexico Together for Healthcare campaign team members who presented about Medicaid Forward at the Nov 2024 NM Legislative Health and Human Services Committee mtg, including Casa de Salud's Executive Director Anjali Taneja MD MPH.