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Dr. Woodruff (left) and dental assistant Rania Travis volunteer their time at the Champaign County Christian Health Center to provide free dental care for the uninsured in the community. Photo by James Kyung

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Despite everyone’s awareness of the national healthcare debate, many CU residents would hardly recognize that a small group is providing free healthcare to the uninsured, operating out of a nondescript building that was once a dental office.

The Champaign County Christian Health Center (CCCHC), a holistic clinic that opened in 2003, is located at 507 S. Second St. in Suite 2E in Champaign, offering services from basic physicals to social services to dental care. Christina Byun, CCCHC administrative coordinator, said CCCHC’s only requirement is that clients have absolutely no sort of insurance — those with Medicare or Medicaid or a medical card are not eligible.

Byun said that there is no age requirement to be met, but the CCCHC’s clientele is generally composed of college graduates and those who aren’t eligible for Medicare: “basically, the uninsured adult population,” she said. She added that the clinic hardly sees children because children tend to be well covered. Byun also noted the strange relationship between economic trends and the amount of clientele the clinic sees.

“The kind of thing with our kind of business, if you would call it that, is that when the market’s bad, our market’s good,” Byun said. “When people are losing jobs and getting laid off and things like that, we have more business. And so, it’s sort of a strange relationship, but you know, even when the market was doing better than it was now, we always had a lot of people coming in. We never had trouble finding patients.”

Even though the CCCHC isn’t ever lacking in clientele, Byun said the clinic is limited by the number of doctors, dentists, social workers and whoever else helps to run the clinic, as everyone is a volunteer. Because the clinic is limited in this aspect, the CCCHC is not like a free-flowing clinic where anyone can walk in at anytime; instead, it operates on an appointment basis.

In this recession, everyone is looking for a little bit of extra help, and the CCCHC is no exception. Byun said her interns are reaching out to many churches for donations, and the clinic as a whole is looking for more monthly donors. At the moment, most of CCCHC’s funding is coming from private donations as well as community or city grants.

Yalissa Bermeo, a UIUC senior studying community health, is one of Byun’s interns. She said that she decided to intern at the clinic because she was torn between whether she wanted to go into the business side of things or if she wanted to work in the nonprofit sector.

“I knew that I could get a taste of the nonprofit stuff here,” Bermeo said. “That’s more of what I really want to do, so I’m glad I realized that here.”

Bermeo said she is currently working on a project in which she is compiling all the names and addresses of clients the CCCHC has seen in the last year and determining which areas of Champaign County they have been coming from.

The clinic’s Christian philosophy has a lot to do with the way it runs things. Part of its mission statement reads, “Our mission is to show and share the love of Jesus Christ to our neighbors of Champaign County by providing holistic, free and quality health care services.”

Byun elaborated on this point. She said, “Yes, we are Christian, and yes, we do believe in certain things. But ... we want everyone to get the help that they need.”

Byun also mentioned that in the next year, the CCCHC will be sharing its space with a Muslim clinic that is supported by the Central Illinois Mosque and Islamic Center in Urbana.

“What we agree on is that we both want to do what we can ... to help people in need,” Byun explained. “And so for a number of years we’ve been lucky enough to kind of receive the kindness of other organizations, so we’ve been able to share their space with them. So I think this is our way of saying, ‘What you’re doing is great, I think we’re on the same page on how we want to help people,’ and now we’re able to give back and return the favor, in some sense.”

Byun said that no matter what, clinics like the CCCHC will always have a place in the community.

“Even if the new healthcare reform, even if everything does go through, there are still gonna be times where people are uninsured. I mean, who knows what’s gonna happen?”