LYNN — The Lynn Community Health Center (LCHC) is hosting a 50 + 1 Anniversary Gala at the Peabody Essex Museum on Friday to celebrate its 50 years in business. The 50th anniversary was last year, but the Lynn Community Health Center (LCHC) was not able to celebrate it then because of the pandemic.
LCHC was founded by Stephen D. Hayes and William Mantzoukas in 1971 and began as a small, storefront mental-health clinic as a response to a severe lack of mental-health services in the community.
The first community health center in the United States opened in Dorchester in 1965, and LCHC was the eighth or ninth community health center to open in the country, according to Mantzoukas.
“It really was a movement and it was a very successful one,” Mantzoukas said.
Today, there are more than 650 staff members and 150 clinicians at LCHC, who work to provide primary medical care, dental care, behavioral health, eye care, pharmacy services, and social services to more than 40,000 patients at 20 locations in Lynn.
The first year it was open, LCHC had 400 patients and now, it has consistently seen more than 400 new patients every month, caring for a total of more than 43,000 patients in 2021.
“The health center is now perceived as a real bedrock in the community,” Mantzoukas said. “I am most proud of the fact that we’ve stayed true to ourselves and our mission of serving the people of Lynn. It’s so easy to lose that focus because you’re pushed and pulled by so many forces in society all the time to be something you’re not, and the health center has always been true to itself, true to the community, and true to the people of Lynn.”
Wife of Stephen Hayes, Clare Hayes, reflected on the health center’s 50-year anniversary, saying she is looking forward to a fun and uplifting night celebrating all of LCHC’s success.
“We started as a social experiment and opened with a staff of five and four desks… We had a bowling alley in the cellar,” Hayes said. “We started as a mental-health clinic where anybody could walk in off the street without an appointment and pay according to what they could afford.”
Three years later, LCHC moved to a house on Goldfish Pond and began providing primary care.
“We became a pioneer, and an expert actually, in delivering what we call, and what everyone now refers to as the integration of care, of primary care and mental health,” Hayes said. “We haven’t just been a leader in Massachusetts, but nationally as well.”
In 1977, LCHC became the provider of Women Infants and Children (WIC) services in Lynn, which expanded to Salem, Peabody and Cape Ann in the 1980s.
The 1980s also saw LCHC add more services including OB/GYN, outreach services in the Lynn schools, and services to Southeast-Asian patients. LCHC is now in 18 of the 25 schools in the city, with nurse practitioners offering full care to students.
LCHC moved to its main location at 269 Union St. in 1993 and opened the Stephen D. Hayes building in 2012.
“It’s an economic engine for the City of Lynn and it’s also an anchor,” Hayes said.
As a federally-qualified health center, LCHC is required to have at least 50 percent of its board members be active patients.
This allows health centers across the country to keep in touch with who the population and community is that they are serving and what their needs are.
“That is why we have been able to grow responsibly and really meet the needs of our community,” Hayes said. “It gives the people we serve a voice and a seat at the table and that is really important.”
Mantzoukas spent more than 30 years serving on the board and was the first director of LCHC, so he worked with many directors and CEOs of the health center, which he said they “have been blessed to have.”
Mantzoukas described the current CEO of LCHC, Dr. Kiame Mahaniah, as being “fabulous” and “terrific.”
Mahaniah is the first doctor to run LCHC, which Mantzoukas believes was a long time coming.
“I think he’s really special. He really cares and puts everything into his role there,” Mantzoukas said.
Mahaniah has been at LCHC for seven years and has been the CEO for four and a half. He said that one of the biggest achievements of the center — that happened before his time — was the founders automatically assuming that mental health and physical health were linked, which is something that was not a mainstream idea back then.
“Every subsequent leader kept building on that, so now we’re at a point where, 50 years later, we do have a really well-integrated system,” Mahaniah said. “We started adding things like substance-abuse-disorder treatment and screening for food insecurity, but it all started with this idea that a patient is a whole person and you have to try to address the needs of the whole person.”
Since his time at LCHC, Mahaniah said he is most proud of the growth of the substance-abuse-disorder treatment program, the attention to the homeless community, and the collaboration with the schools.
“The biggest achievement, I think, is how all of the staff and all of the leaders over all these years managed to keep growing these programs,” he said.
When looking into the future, Mahaniah hopes LCHC will learn to go upstream in the next 50 years, trying to prevent or decrease illnesses.
“We’ve really mastered the downstream services, meaning when someone is sick we can help them,” said Mahaniah. “What I’m really hoping for in the next 50 years is that we really learn how to go upstream. How do we leverage our presence in the community, for instance in the schools, and what services do we need to provide to kids so that they never develop mental illness or if they do, it’s a milder form? How do we help families address food insecurity so that all of the health conditions related to food insecurity is something we don’t have?”
Mahaniah hopes the next decade will see LCHC trying to move upstream to try to prevent these things from happening, as they continue to try to locate parts of the community that need the most help.
