Minnie Jones Health Center Celebrates 20th Anniversary

The Minnie Jones Health Care Center is located at 257 Biltmore Avenue in Asheville.   Photo: Urban News
The Minnie Jones Health Care Center is located at 257 Biltmore Avenue in Asheville. Photo: Urban News

This April Western North Carolina Community Health Services, Inc. (WNCCHS), celebrates 20 years of offering optimal health-care services to citizens of Buncombe County and Western North Carolina.

The nonprofit, better known as the Minnie Jones Health Center, has been a pioneer in providing free or subsidized care to area residents with limited resources.

The center began when, during the 1990s, Buncombe County experienced significant growth and also faced explosive growth in health care costs. These trends were accompanied by sustained increases in the number of uninsured persons, and the local healthcare safety net came under unrelenting strain. It quickly became clear that WNC needed additional preventive and primary health care.

Living up close and personal with members of her immediate community, Minnie Jones saw clearly the need for affordable healthcare. On Good Friday in April 1992, Ms. Jones, Carlos M. Gomez, and Dr. Polly Ross established Western North Carolina Community Health Services at 89 Montford Avenue, the historic Gudger House. The center’s founders focused on helping those without affordable healthcare.

In 1994, the first WNCCHS clinic opened to clients as a Wellness Center (a day health program for persons with AIDS) at Kenilworth Presbyterian Church. As word spread of the services offered, the clinic saw approximately 200 individuals by the end of that year.

Today, under the guidance of Carlos Gomez, Executive Director, WNCCHS—renamed the Minnie Jones Health Center in 2010—sees more than that number of clients each day.

Portrait of Minnie Jones, a lifelong community activist.  Photo: Urban News
Portrait of Minnie Jones, a lifelong community activist. Photo: Urban News

Minnie Jones, a lifelong community activist originally from Spartanburg, SC, came to Asheville after working with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. throughout the South on civil rights issues. After seeing the disparities locally in housing and healthcare, she continued her civil rights work, becoming the first person to integrate Pisgah View Apartments.

Wherever she saw needs in the community she worked tirelessly to fill them: for example, she established and led the Minnie Jones After-School Program, which touched the lives of countless children over many years.

The vision of the Minnie E. Jones Health Care Center is “To assist every resident of our service area with having access to a regular source of primary health care by providing culturally competent care, when our patients need it, at a cost individuals and the community can sustain.”

In addition to specific preventive and primary care services, the center provides dental care and behavioral health services and operates a pharmacy. Bilingual employees support the needs of local immigrant populations: one member of the pharmacy staff regularly switches between English, Russian, and Spanish as clients approach the window.

In 2009, Minnie Jones was awarded North Carolina’s highest civilian honor, the “Order of the Long Leaf Pine,” for her humanitarian work in Western North Carolina.