Local Lift
When a group of Lander, Wyoming, residents realized 20 percent of their neighbors couldn’t afford medical care, they refused to stand by. Today the free medical clinic they launched, with support from the LOR Foundation, helps more than 100 people a year.
Local Lift
When a group of Lander, Wyoming, residents realized 20 percent of their neighbors couldn’t afford medical care, they refused to stand by. Today the free medical clinic they launched, with support from the LOR Foundation, helps more than 100 people a year.
Roughly 12 percent of Wyoming’s 600,000 residents do not have health insurance of any kind, landing the Equality State with the third worst uninsured rate in the nation. And in Lander, Wyoming, a vibrant 7,000-person town tucked up against the granite flank of the Wind River Range, that percentage is higher than anywhere else in the state: Nearly 20 percent of Fremont County residents do not have any coverage.
That means many Lander locals don’t get care for treatable conditions and injuries, instead relying on the emergency room when those conditions turn life-threatening. It’s not only expensive for the medical system, but it’s also devastating to the patients.
“I was seeing people come in who had diabetes and who would get a cut on their foot that would then turn into an ulcer that would then turn into an amputation because they weren’t able to afford their insulin and control their blood sugars,” says Kevin Wilson, a Lander nurse and executive director of the Lander Free Medical Clinic. “And that’s just one of hundreds of stories because they haven’t been able to access basic primary care.”
This isn’t a problem that’s unique to Lander. More than 27 million Americans—roughly eight percent of the country—lack insurance. But in a place that also hosts a poverty rate (14 percent) that’s higher than the national average and one primary care physician for every 1,234 residents, it’s particularly pronounced.
Fortunately, Lander also hosts a community of problem solvers, ready to raise their hands to help their town—people like Wilson, a Lander nurse who had seen the free medical clinics in Cody and Laramie and wanted to launch something similar in Lander. His idea: Create a Lander clinic that would provide free preventative care to low-income and uninsured residents. Wilson and a few other locals convened a public meeting attended by more than 20 Lander medical professionals who wanted to help. “We started from zero,” Wilson says. “We started with an idea. And we needed the capital to start getting this thing going. We had a community meeting, and LOR was right there in the audience.”
LOR had joined the Lander community only a year before. The private foundation works directly with people in small towns across the Mountain West to fund ideas that improve quality of life. It’s one of the few foundations in the country that’s focused on rural areas. In 2020, the LOR Foundation hired a longtime Lander local deeply connected to the town to serve as the Lander community officer—an approach the foundation takes in each of the seven small towns where it works. Being in the audience at Wilson’s community meeting was just one of the ways LOR’s community officer engaged with locals to understand their ideas for helping Lander.
“The foundation doesn’t believe it has the answers; we believe the community does. We believe people have the answers,” says LOR’s executive director Gary Wilmot. “We take up the problems and the ideas and the solutions community members bring to us, right away.”
WATCH NOW: Patients and providers talk about the impact of Lander's Free Medical Clinic and how it all came together in this short video.
In Lander, that meant providing funding for the Lander Free Medical Clinic to purchase software that allowed it to launch its fundraising campaign. It was a small investment with a big result: Just over a year later, the Lander Free Medical Clinic opened its doors and provided primary care services to more than 100 patients in that first year. Since then, the clinic has raised more than $300,000 and continues to see at least 100 patients a year.
“LOR really helped breathe this thing into existence with that start-up funding and just believing in us from the get-go,” Wilson says. “[They] made the grant process very simple and streamlined for us.”
That simple, straightforward path to funding is the bedrock upon which LOR was founded. The foundation ditches lengthy grant applications, deadlines, complicated final reports, and wonky philanthropic jargon in favor of in-person conversations and fast funding that helps launch projects (about 70 percent of LOR’s grants reach grantees within 30 days of them bringing an idea forward; and more than half of the grants made this year have gone out the door in less than two weeks).
“We like to think of ourselves as a resource just like the hardware store on Main Street: Anyone should be able to walk in and ask for help without needing to have some special vocabulary or the time and ability to cut through red tape,” Wilmot says.
This approach to local giving—one that puts the person, not the process at the center of things—is likely why last year, LOR provided funding for almost 300 community solutions across the seven communities where it works. Fifty-nine of those grants were made in Lander, including one to the Lander Free Medical Clinic to help expand its offerings to include vision, dental, and specialty medical services.
“It’s a huge feat to be able to take care of our neighbors and really help transform their lives with the care we’re able to provide here,” Wilson says. “We know we’re adding years or potentially decades onto their lives—that’s more time with their families or getting to see their grandkids be born. Those things are really huge for us. That’s the work of primary care.”
And that really is the essence of LOR: Every solution the foundation takes up can be traced back to an individual like Wilson who had an idea and some energy. It’s a person with an idea who’s ready to raise their hand and who just needs a little help.
Looking to Launch Your Own Clinic?
Lander Free Medical Clinic executive director Kevin Wilson shares some tips for getting a free medical clinic off the ground.
1. Have a really good fundraising plan from the beginning. Network for Good has been great for us, and it has a whole marketing email platform built into it. Maybe see about getting some volunteer grantwriting folks on board to help, too. A lot of it is just about storytelling and showing that real world impact: For us, that might mean showing how the EpiPens we got through a partnership with Direct Relief International saved the life of an 8-year-old boy who accidentally ate peanut butter and went into anaphylaxis. His throat was closing. He was in agonal breathing. And the ambulance was still 15 minutes away. One of our patients used the EpiPen they got from us and saved his life.
2.Get with AmeriCorps because with AmeriCorps VISTA, you don’t have to pay salaries. You can get a grant from your local state service organizations or from a number of other groups.
3.Reach out to your local medical community and get buy-in from local providers who would be willing to offer services at a discounted rate (not just the docs; talk to the business office folks, too). We were pretty intentional about that from the start because we knew patients would need referrals. We’ve had great support from local groups like Fremont Orthopedics, Main Street Dental, Wyoming Cardiopulmonary Services, and others.
4.Know how to navigate more than the medical system. Like how to help folks get a birth certificate or social security card if they don’t have any proof of identification. Or access SNAP benefits. A good clinic recognizes the physical, mental, and social domains of each patient who walks in the door—and how they interact. We should have some kind of a plan to address all kinds of those factors.
This content was paid for and created by LOR Foundation. The editorial staff at The Chronicle had no role in its preparation. Find out more about paid content.
Built with Shorthand