Patients, community members, and others marched through Portland on Sunday afternoon to show support for a public health clinic facing potential closure.
About 200 people marched to Monument Square in downtown Portland to listen to speakers expressing support for the India Street Public Health Center, which provides services including sexually transmitted infection testing, a needle-exchange program, the overdose antidote Narcan and HIV-positive primary health care.
A proposed Portland city budget announced in early April would close the clinic and transfer patients to the federally qualified Portland Community Health Center. Some city officials say the switch would be more cost-effective while still providing the same quality of care.
Supporters of the clinic at the rally say the personalized services offered are essential to many patients, and that its closure would jeopardize the well-being of many of the city’s most vulnerable residents.
“We have already grieved so many losses in this community in the last few years. And in the midst of this crisis, politicians here at the local level don’t even acknowledge that this crisis has been produced by exactly these kinds of benign, administrative-seeming measures that seem apolitical — but that are absolutely about the distribution of life chances to so many people in our community,” says Annie Spencer of Portland, a doctoral candidate writing a dissertation about the heroin and opioid epidemic and a volunteer at the Health Center’s needle exchange program, who helped organize the event.
Wayne Dyer, 38, of Portland told the crowd at the rally that he was introduced to the India Street clinic’s needle exchange when he faced addiction years ago. He has been clean and sober for two years and gives credit to the services he received from the clinic.
“I kept going there and they showed me a lot of love and a lot of support [and] helped me with different things, like health wise,” he says. “And then it came to a point in my life where I got better. I wanted treatment, I wanted to get better. Now I’m coming up on two years. I just want to say that I don’t know if I would have been able to do that without people like that in my life.”
The rally Sunday follows one held last week in front of Portland City Hall by supporters of the clinic.
Mayor Ethan Strimling has expressed concern over the proposed plan to close the clinic, while Portland’s Finance Committee has endorsed it.
The India Street clinic serves about 4,000 patients a year. The city council will hold a public hearing at Portland City Hall Monday night about the proposed budget, and expects to take a final vote in mid-May.