Callen-Lorde Community Health Center

Callen-Lorde Community Health Center is a primary care center located at 356 West 18th Street in New York, New York state. Callen-Lorde also provides comprehensive mental health services at The Thea Spyer Center, located at 230 West 17th Street. Callen-Lorde is dedicated to providing medical health care to the city's LGBTQ population without regard to ability to pay.

Callen-Lorde Community Health Center logo

Main entrance

The facility offers a variety of services, including dental care, HIV/STD testing and treatment, mental health services, women's health services, transgender hormone therapy, and medical case management support. Callen-Lorde is also home to the Health Outreach to Teens (HOTT) program, which serves youth between the ages of 13 and 22 in an on-premises clinic and a fully equipped medical van.

Callen-Lorde is the only primary care center in New York City created specifically to serve LGBTQ communities.[1] Callen-Lorde's grassroots heritage dates back nearly 50 years to the St. Mark's Community Clinic and the Gay Men's Health Project,[2] two volunteer-based clinics that provided screening and treatment for sexually-transmitted diseases. These clinics merged in 1983 to form Community Health Project, a mostly volunteer-staffed, episodic care program housing the nation's first community-based HIV clinic.[3] The center has grown both in size and scope since these early days: from a 2,500 square-foot space inside of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center on West 13th Street that primarily worked with HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, into a comprehensive primary care center housed in more than 3 locations, including the 6-floor, 27,000 square-foot 18th Street facility that it moved into in 1997.[4]

In 2007, it was among over 530 New York City arts and social service institutions to receive part of a $30 million grant from the Carnegie Corporation, which was made possible through a donation by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.[5]

In 2015, during National Health Center Week, Callen-Lorde was one[6] of 266 health centers[7] selected for Affordable Care Act funding as a Federally Qualified Health Center, for providing primary care to a medically underserved population. In a proclamation announcing these awards, President Obama declared, "This week, as we recognize the 50-year anniversary of the first community health centers being established in America, let us remember that health care is not a privilege for the few among us who can afford it, but a right for all Americans -- and let us recognize the vital role health centers across our country play in carrying us toward greater health for our people."[8]