Hightower Uses Hildalgo County Medical Services as Example of Grassroots Change

In an excerpt from his new book, Swim Against the Current, long-time writer and activist Jim Hightower tells the grassroots success story of Charlie Alfero and the innovative community partnership he used to develop Hildalgo Medical Services, which began in Lordsburg, NM in 1994. Hildalgo County, in New Mexico's boot heel, was abandoned by copper companies and lost its hospital in 1979, and then its last doctor in 1983. You really should read the whole article, but here are a few tidbits to get you started:

There was an obvious need and demand for health services, but Hidalgo is hardly the sort of lucrative market that such profit-hungry chains as Hospital Corporation of America are willing to consider. The county's leaders realized they would have to put something together for themselves. So in 1994, they asked the state rural health office to send some experts to Lordsburg, the county seat, to help guide them. One who came was Charlie Alfero. Years previously, he had attended a small college up the road in a neighboring county, and he was glad for the chance to revisit a region he loved.

Alfero had been working with the rural outreach program of the state university's medical school, and he remembered from his earlier time in the boot heel that despite economic difficulties, the people of the area shared strong egalitarian values. He felt that they might do big things. He arrived with a vision: The people there could create a health commons of their own design -- a community complex that would provide one-stop service for medical, dental and mental healthcare, with family support services and economic development built in.

Most of Hidalgo's residents have lived in the county all of their lives and have an attachment to the area and to one another. "We stick together; we help each other in times of need," said Irene Galven, now the city clerk. It was this sense of community, the residents' willingness to throw in on projects to benefit everyone, that inspired Alfero to throw in with them.

It was not a simple project. For nearly four years, Charlie made the 600-mile round-trip commute each week from his home in Albuquerque to Lordsburg to work with eager locals to establish Hidalgo Medical Services (HMS), get it on its feet financially and get it moving -- one small step at a time.

...  A dozen years after opening its doors, HMS has become the health commons it was envisioned to be. On its tenth anniversary, it opened the doors of its new 22,000-square-foot clinic in Lordsburg, a modern, full-service facility with nine exam rooms, lab and x-ray rooms, a dental clinic with six chairs, and offices to deal with mental health problems, substance abuse and family support needs. It has a staff numbering more than 140, operating on a budget of more than $10 million a year.

In addition to Lordsburg, HMS now has clinics in six other communities in two counties, including one in Silver City, where it originally had to go to find doctors who were willing to come to Hidalgo twice a week.

"I didn't deliver healthcare," Alfero noted. "I'm not even a doctor. I just gave people an idea, pointed them in a direction and they built this themselves. People who rely on external forces to determine their future are going to find a bad future. The people in this area are showing what healthcare can be if we invest in people, not in the layers of intermediaries looking to make money off a top-heavy system. Our country needs more clinics like this."

Hightower's book, written long-time collaborator Susan DeMarco, relates other such tales of people power producing real change when other, more traditional, efforts were less than succcessful:

The inspiration came from the people themselves, people that I had come across in my travels, and I found that unlike what you find in the New York Times or on the nightly news, there is a very progressive spirit in the countryside, enormous progressive activism ... not merely in politics but also in business, the food economy, healthcare, religion, numerous different ways.

These people's stories were very uplifting, yet not being told.

Thank goodness that Hightower and others like him are willing to go where mainstream media outlets fear to (or won't) tread -- sharing inspiring tales of real change started by ordinary people in ordinary places like Hildalgo County.