Lackawanna County’s first licensed drug and alcohol drop-in center now offers a monthly mobile health clinic thanks to a partnership with a local community health organization.
Scranton’s Community Intervention Center, a daytime homeless shelter, has collaborated for years with the nonprofit Wright Center for Community Health, but in early 2022 the two organizations began working together in a new way. The Wright Center’s mobile vaccine clinic arrives at CIC, located 445 N. 6th Avenue, on the third Friday of each month to offer services.
Michelle Matyjevich, Deputy Director of the Community Intervention Center (CIC), said her organization hasn’t been closed a single day since the start of the pandemic.
In February, the Wright Center started bringing a bus directly to CIC’s headquarters on the corner of Linden Avenue and 6th Avenue. They began offering vaccines to those who wanted them. Matyjevich said the homeless or transient population has benefited greatly from the partnership, as they’re a chronically underserved community.
On Friday, the Wright Center’s bus was in CIC’s parking lot. Two Wright Center employees worked a sign-in table outside of the bus while medical assistants worked inside the vehicle.
Scarlet Pujols Recio, a community health worker at Wright’s Scranton Clinic, said their duty isn’t just to talk the homeless population into taking a shot of the COVID-19 vaccine.
“We help out patients sometimes apply for housing or if they need a visit to the clinic,” Pujols Recio said. “If they need any assistance with food, utilities and medications – sometimes we help them apply for insurance. We guide them to where they can find the food pantries.”
Jason Griffiths, a CIC housing case manager and social worker, said it’s best to bring care to a well-trafficked meeting place like his organization, because sometimes it’s hard for the homeless population to make or keep appointments.
“If someone has something here they want to look at [like] their foot, [the medical assistants] could go, ‘OK well let’s take him down right now,’ and he could be seen immediately,” Griffiths said, “and that is huge.”
Betsy Miller is the practice manager at the Wright Center’s Clarks Summit Office. She was one of the two employees working outside the mobile clinic on Friday. Miller said their bus travels “all over the place.”
“We do a lot in Hazleton because they’re underserved and underinsured,” Miller said. “We’re at the Saint Francis of Assisi Kitchen. We’re at the senior centers. We’re all over at schools, because we’ll do catch-up vaccine clinics as well as covid testing and covid vaccines.”
One of Griffiths’ duties is connecting with the homeless population where they are. Sometimes that means locating people in abandoned buildings or in small tent communities to offer them support. But it’s not as easy as it used to be, he said, when he started working with CIC nearly 25 years ago. Where the Lackawanna River Heritage Trail sits, Griffiths visited the river more often.
“That’s where all my homeless clients were,” Griffiths said. “There would be tent communities – there could be 20-30 people down there… You just went down there and you got to talk to people. But when they put the trail in, everyone started spreading off and going places.”
The Community Intervention Center said they see an average of 60 clients per day. Those who drop in can use the organization’s computer lab to connect with friends and family and apply for social services. Clients can also use the organization’s washing machine and attend social events such as drum circles, painting workshops and yoga sessions. Breakfast and lunch are also served daily. Matyjevich said the number of meals adds up.
“We figure that we’re serving an average of 60 meals for breakfast and 60 for lunch, which is somewhere around 43,000 meals a year,” she said.
Earlier this summer, the Community Intervention Center celebrated its 50th anniversary. What used to be called “The Rap House” before 1988, CIC still operates in mostly the same way as the day it opened in 1972. Now, Matyjevich said, there’s trained professional staff instead of only volunteers.
After several location changes from its original spot on Courthouse Square in Scranton, CIC is now located just outside the city’s downtown and is open every day from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m.
