The USGBC LEED Gold-Certified, 34,660 square foot health center opens in August in City Heights, bringing all health and support services into a state-of-the art building that serves as a hub for health, wellbeing and community. The building more than triples La Maestra Family Clinic’s primary care service capacity with additional space for mental health, dental, optometry, pharmacy, laboratory, health education and support services, in a healing environment.

With the goal of enhancing the future green health center through the addition of thoughtfully selected art and wayfinding elements, La Maestra Family Clinic and a group of local and regional leaders in healing and the arts launch La Maestra’s “Culture and Healing through Arts” (CHA) initiative. CHA offers temporary exhibits and a permanent collection of exceptional art by emerging and established regional artists, reflecting healing and diverse cultures; collaborative art projects; opportunities for artists-in-residence and a retail gallery.

Promotoras and Medically Trained Cultural Liaisons representing growing population of refugees from Somalia and Sudan as well as Latinos voice a need for services in Lemon Grove. La Maestra Family Clinic establishes the first community health center there by opening a Medical and Dental health center, providing a health home for diverse, low-income residents in this area of southeast San Diego County.

A formal Senior Medicine Program begins at the City Heights clinic with a geriatric specialist onsite once a month, in collaboration with the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine Geriatric Division. By 2008, the program expands with the geriatrician onsite weekly.
Senior Peer Promotora Program launches in partnership with the Council of Community Clinics and funding form San Diego County Mental Health. The program recruits and trains health consumers and family members, or “promotoras”, who speak English, Spanish, Somali, Laotian, Nuer, and Vietnamese to provide outreach, education, and support groups to assist low-income, uninsured older adults and their families to access primary care, mental health, and social services. Presentations also include fall prevention, domestic violence, senior depression, and financial literacy.

La Maestra Family Clinic builds onto the OB/Gyn ultrasound services at City Heights and begins to transport patients from satellite clinics to facilitate access to this service.
La Maestra also becomes the first urban clinic in San Diego to implement a Telemedicine program, providing mental health services to rural clinics in San Diego and Imperial counties including Borrego Community Health Foundation, Clínicas de Salud, Sycuan Medical Center and Mountain Health & Community Services.

Building on its previous efforts to link nutrition to healthcare through food donation drives for patients who do not have enough money for food for their families, La Maestra Family Clinic becomes a Food Bank distributor, launching its onsite Food Pantry to offer free nutritious staples to families in need once a week, later increasing to twice weekly.

Zara Marselian receives the 2003 Leadership Award, and the 2004 Overall Leadership Award from San Diego’s Channel 10 KGTV. Leonard Villarreal, a well-known local news anchor for Channel 10 visits La Maestra Family Clinic in City Heights to celebrate the achievement with employees and volunteers of the clinic.

La Maestra Family Clinic receives significant grant funding from Office of Refugee Resettlement, CalWORKs, and others to provide job training and placement for the “hardest to place” refugees.
In collaboration with MAAC and other partners, La Maestra provides entry-level medical and support staff positions to refugees and advances its innovative Medically Trained Cultural Liaison Model to improve cultural diversity in the healthcare field. Over 345 new jobs are created in the first year and hundreds more in the following years. Many of these motivated, new employees are able to move from receiving welfare into the workforce. Strong, ongoing alliances are formed with local employers from healthcare, adult education, children’s literacy, government agencies and legalization, among others.

Building on expertise and partnerships built through La Maestra Amnesty Center’s economic development programs, La Maestra Family Clinic begins expanding its Circle of Care to include additional economic development, community development, education and housing related programs and collaboratives.
Through collaborations with partners such as Metropolitan Area Advisory Committee on Anti-Poverty (MAAC) and City Heights Community Development Corporation, La Maestra Family Clinic bridges health and housing, bringing preventative health care and education, healthy housing assessments, and eligibility services to low-income housing complexes where many residents are immigrants and refugees, while also linking them to a culturally competent medical home at the clinic in City Heights.
La Maestra Family Clinic also works with these partners to implement vocational skills training and job creation for housing residents. East African refugee residents of housing complexes are trained and hired as Medically Trained Cultural Liaisons, and entry-level medical staff at local healthcare facilities and schools.