Biographical / Historical

The Charlottesville, Virginia, Westhaven Public Housing project opened to residents on December 14, 1964. Nearly thirty years later, in 1993, the University of Virginia School of Nursing established a grant-funded Community Nursing Center at Westhaven intended to provide primary healthcare to residents in addition to offering clinical education programs for the school's nursing students as well as opportunities for clinical research projects. The completion of the grant in the spring of 2000 led to the center's closure. A significant collection of materials concerning the clinic during this period may be found in the Bjoring Center's Doris Glick Papers.

Since the Community Nursing Center's usefulness to public-housing and low-income residents had been amply demonstrated over the years of the UVA School-of-Nursing-sponsored project, a group of concerned citizens, public agencies, organizations, and churches united to form the Westhaven Clinic Coalition in May of 2000, with the objective to reopen the clinic and develop strategies to sustain its continued operations. The Virginia Organizing Project agreed to serve as funding conduit and financial manager for the clinic, and along with substantial assistance from the Public Housing Association of Residents (PHAR), the UVA Women's Place, the Sexual Assault Resource Agency (SARA), Martha Jefferson Hospital, Westminster Presbyterian Church, Trinity Episcopal Church, and the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority (CRHA), the clinic reopened, largely with volunteer labor, in August of 2000. With the sustained assistance of numerous additional individuals and entities, the Westhaven Clinic expanded operations and continues to provide nursing services, health and life skills information, access to resources, and a strong sense of community for the residents of Westhaven and others.

Scope and Contents

The Westhaven Clinic Papers, taken as a whole, constitute an ideal model of a successful, health-based community organizing project. While materials span a roughly two-decade period between the late 1990s and 2020 — encompassing the final years of the clinic's formal University of Virginia School of Nursing sponsorship — the bulk of the papers centers on the first five years of the clinic's successor incarnation, led by the Westhaven Coalition. Of particular importance are extensive correspondence records for each of these five years, 2000 to 2004. These detail every aspect of the organization campaign, including consideration of the clinic's mission and activities, its potential sponsors and funding sources, and its personnel and management. Included also for this period are detailed budgetary and financial statements as well as a nearly complete collection of the Coalition meeting agendas and minutes, again with greatest representation in this first five-year window. A series of clinic operations folders detail activities and resources available to clinic visitors, along with limited management and charting strategies and an immunization campaign that terminated with the closure of the UVA-sponsored facility. Statistical reports trace clinic usage for selected years. A small portion of material concerns the faith-based parish-nursing model of operations that characterized the clinic during this initial phase, particularly under the leadership of Holly Kerr Edwards, RN, of the Martha Jefferson Hospital, who also served as a Charlottesville city council member and vice mayor before her untimely passing at age 56 in 2017.

Arrangement

The Westhaven Clinic Papers are organized alphabetically by general subject category and chronologically under each subject heading.