Editor’s Note: Amy Weaver, CEO of Direct Relief, addressed community health providers from around the nation at the Community Health Conference in Chicago on August 17, in a speech focused on caring for vulnerable patients in a time of growing need.

Below are highlights from her speech.

Thank you, Dr. Rhee and the entire NACHC team for inviting me to speak today. I am giving my first public speech since becoming CEO of Direct Relief three months ago, so I am particularly grateful and particularly nervous.

But this is a very welcome opportunity to say something we at Direct Relief don’t get to say often enough in person: Thank you.

Thank you to all the community health centers here for the vital, complex, and often unsung work that you do every single day.

I am especially appreciative of our long-standing partnerships with community health centers throughout the United States. Direct Relief currently partners with over 500 centers nationwide. We are fortunate to learn from you and work alongside you — supporting both day-to-day community healthcare and emergency response.

Now, it is common when expressing gratitude to say, “We believe in you.”

But at Direct Relief, we’ve seen your work up close. We’ve seen your patients’ A1C levels drop. We’ve met patients whose lives turned around because of your HIV treatment, your substance use recovery programs, your trauma care. We’ve seen your cooking classes, the fresh produce, the trust you build every day.

So we don’t just believe in you. We know what you do works.

Since the civil rights era, health centers have paired extraordinary medical care with deep community understanding. You’ve shaped care to fit the people you serve – their conditions, their realities, their hopes. You are more vital than ever to Direct Relief’s mission of increasing health for all people – regardless of religion, politics, or ability to pay.

And the truth is, you’re going to be needed more than ever.

So let me tell you a bit more about Direct Relief – our 76-year history and how community health centers have helped shape our journey.

Back in the 1930s, our founder, William Zimdin was a very successful and very colorful businessman in Estonia.
He was also an outspoken critic of fascism and Adolf Hitler. As the Nazi party gained power, Zimdin and his business partner, Dennis Karczag, were forced to flee Europe, leaving behind most of their fortune.

In the aftermath of World War II, Zimdin and Karczag – who alone had lost 35 members of his extended family to concentration camps and other horrors — had reestablished themselves successfully in Santa Barbara, California. But they discovered their friends, family, and former employees who had survived were now struggling to live in the ashes of post-war Europe.

In 1948, Zimdin began sending parcels of food, medicine, and clothing back to refugees. He packed thousands of parcels in his own pantry with the help of Karczag, Karczag’s sister, and – of course – his butler (as one does).

These humble – or maybe not quite so humble — beginnings laid the foundation for Direct Relief. Last year alone, from our state-of-the-art warehouse in Santa Barbara, we provided nearly $2 billion dollars in donated and procured medicines and medical supplies to our partners in 92 countries.

Now, in the years after Zimdin began shipping parcels to Europe, Direct Relief both narrowed and widened its focus. We narrowed our mission to healthcare and widened our reach to six continents. We were active around the world, but not in the United States.

That all changed 20 years ago this month.

In August of 2005, Direct Relief had just concluded a small pilot program in California, testing to see how viable our model of medical aid could work domestically.

Then – as all of you will painfully remember — Hurricane Katrina slammed into Louisiana and Mississippi, killing over 1,800 people and devastating an already overburdened health system.

Despite public perception, the communities hardest hit by Katrina– many of them poor neighborhoods with large Black and Vietnamese-American populations – needed primary care even more urgently than emergency departments. Direct Relief watched helplessly as people with chronic conditions struggled without access to their prescription medicines, things we typically provide, like insulin, diuretics, steroids, and more.

What Direct Relief realized – rather painfully — at that moment was that we could send medicine to Liberia, but we didn’t have the expertise or licensing to send to medicine to Louisiana.

That changed with a call to the National Association of Community Health Centers, who provided guidance and connected us with local health centers in the impacted areas. We witnessed these community health centers – along with free clinics, charitable pharmacies, and volunteer doctors and nurses sleeping in churches – step up in the weeks afterward to care for people who’d lost their homes and their medicines.

At that time, Direct Relief had never responded to a domestic disaster on a large scale. But within six months, we had pivoted to provide more than $50 million in medical aid and funding assistance to health centers in the Gulf Coast. And we established a network of partners in the region, many of whom we’re still actively working with today, and many of whom are here in this room.

Even more significantly, our work with the community health centers and NACHC inspired Direct Relief to pivot its focus from being solely international to becoming the largest charitable medicines program in the United States — supporting all 50 states and four US territories.

Because of all of you, Direct Relief now supports community health providers nationwide with medicines and supplies for diabetes, hypertension, COPD, asthma, and much more.

We procure cold-chain storage, fund resilient power and mobile units, and distribute grants and awards for community health centers who take innovative, local approaches to maternal health, infectious disease, nutrition, and beyond.

In total, we’ve shipped more than $1 billion dollars wholesale in medical aid to community health center partners, and made over 100,000 deliveries – all completely free of cost.

We’ve also awarded more than $128 million in cash funding to 600 health centers to support community health, access, resilient power, mobile health, and disaster response.

And we have done all of this because of your inspiration.

I haven’t been at Direct Relief long, but I’ve already lost count of how many times I’ve heard us described as an “emergency response” organization. That’s not wrong – but it’s not the whole story.

Yes, Direct Relief responds to emergencies. We stage caches of emergency medical supplies around the country ahead of hurricane season. We provide emergency grants and requested medical support to responding organizations, which are often community health centers. We also work in disaster-impacted communities over time to increase resilience and support long-term recovery.

While disaster relief is part of the work we do, it is only one part. Our more significant work takes place every day – through programs like Safety Net Support, ReplenishRx, Fund for Health Equity, Power for Health, our grant-making, our distribution of opioid antagonists, and medical refrigeration. These and other support measures form the backbone of our everyday partnerships.

The truth is emergencies grab headlines. They demand immediate, intensive response. And today, the line between disaster and everyday life is increasingly blurred.

Natural disasters are more frequent and more severe. Recovery takes longer and the harms to physical and mental health compound. Food insecurity is rising. Food banks face funding cuts and overwhelming demand. Systemic problems only worsen in communities where houses and clinics are damaged by disaster. Medicaid cuts and other limitations threaten patients and strain providers.

These aren’t political statements. They’re just facts. And they are contributing to a growing crisis of everyday health.

Today, I would argue we are facing an oncoming emergency. Impending cuts to public insurance programs and social support threaten millions of health center patients.

We need to treat this like an emergency – and prepare as we would for a wildfire, a hurricane, or a tsunami. This moment demands that the nation’s safety net – all of us – rise to meet growing needs for healthcare and social support.

First, I am a firm believer that the most powerful tool we have is education. We need to paint an even stronger picture of community healthcare. We need to show the everyday heroism of doctors, community health workers, pharmacists, and leaders.

Once we’ve drawn that picture, we need to put it before even larger audiences. We need to show that the safety net must always be there for those who need it, regardless of their ability to pay, and – critically – that it works.

As a former CFO, I love numbers. And the math is clear: we are all healthier, and this country works better, because of your work.

I am convinced that when people understand the numbers, they can only reach one conclusion: We must protect and invest in our nation’s health centers.

Now, I know encouraging visibility right now is fraught. This is a time when many are keeping their heads down, trying to avoid drawing additional attention to their clinics, staff, or patients. This is where NACHC and Direct Relief can help. Let us highlight your incredible work. Send us your stories. Let us sing your praises.

Second, I hope each health center will become a partner of Direct Relief and benefit from the free medical aid we can provide.

Coming so recently to Direct Relief, I am comfortable bragging about what our team has already built.

Direct Relief does many things well, most of them on a pretty vast scale. We are terrific at procuring medications, supplies, and funding, and at working with the companies that donate them. We excel at the fastidious, painstaking process of storing, shipping, and monitoring cold-chain medications, and at helping our partners source or build the infrastructure to support them.

Our pharmacists develop large-scale caches of medicines to stage in disaster-vulnerable communities – and field medic packs used by street medicine teams and emergency responders.

Our expertise is large-scale and systemic, not local. That is why our partners are essential.

You put these resources to the best possible use. You are our eyes and ears on the ground. We are privileged to benefit from the trust you have built, from the high-touch, compassionate care you offer, and from the wisdom you have gathered over decades.

In addition to Direct Relief’s partnerships with individual health centers, we also work with primary care associations, and with the team at NACHC. Together, we’ve built trauma-informed care initiatives with the Texas Association of Community Health Centers, and responded to hurricanes with associations in Florida and North Carolina.

For two decades, we’ve worked closely with NACHC to build initiatives like the Helping Build Healthy Communities awards, sponsored by BD. We also collaborate on the Community Health Forum, which highlights the challenges and innovations facing health centers.

So, as we face this uncertain future, reach out to us! Ideally, we’d like to count all 1,400 of the country’s community health centers among our partners.

To be clear, there is no cost to receive Direct Relief support. We cover shipping, cold-chain management, and other associated costs. We never send medications or supplies our partners haven’t specifically requested.

As I said earlier, we need to treat changes to day-to-day health care the same way we would treat an emergency – with pre-planning, with education, and with deep, deep partnerships.

You’re local experts, but you have universal wisdom to share. And together, we are unstoppable.