Doors. Real doors. On the exam rooms.
That’s one of the luxuries Robin Lowitz looks forward to most when the Jewish Community Free Clinic of Sonoma County moves to its new Cotati headquarters.
A physician, Lowitz founded the clinic in 2000 and has had to make do with low-tech rented space to treat her patients. Curtains, not doors, separated the exam areas.
But in November, groundbreaking for a new 1,136-square-foot facility, located adjacent to Cotati’s Congregation Ner Shalom, will take place, with many community members pitching in to help.
“We have a volunteer architect, a volunteer landscape architect and volunteer contractors,” she says. “They will build it for free in an old-fashioned barn-raising, getting all the tradespeople together at the site at the same time.”
The Berkeley native estimates it will take one week to lay the foundation, and another week to build the structure.
The sooner, the better, as far as Lowitz is concerned. Her patients, most of them Hispanic migrant workers, indigents and the homeless, desperately need the clinic’s services. The only criteria for admittance: no insurance of any kind. No Medi-Cal, no Medicare, no Kaiser.
“Our patients are the people who fall through the cracks,” she says.
Lowitz, 45, views the clinic as her contribution to the Jewish mandate of healing the world. Over the years, she has garnered much support from the Jewish community, with sizeable grants from such sources as the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, the Koret Foundation, the Bernard Osher Jewish Philanthropies Foundation, the Bill Graham Foundation and many more.
The clinic even obtained a grant from the Christian Community Health Fellowship, the only Jewish group to obtain funding from them.
The clinic has an operating budget of $205,000 (additional information is available at (707) 792-1932 or www.jewishfreeclinic.org).
Most of the staff volunteers their time, including the doctors, nurses, pharmacist and myriad other medical personnel. Even Lowitz receives no payment for her services.
“It was very important to me that the Jewish community become involved in offering some kind of answer to the disparities in the health care system,” she says, adding that her work at the clinic has “enabled me to practice medicine in a moral way.”