Member Profile: Homeless Healthcare

The Community Healthcorps team at IFH has 15 full time members. Each month we profile a member so you can get to know our team and their role a little better!

This month, meet Reed!

Name: Reed
Position: Care Manager for the Homeless


Reed on the scavenger hunt during Pre Service Orientation.

Brief bio:
I was raised on a llama farm in rural New England and spent four years as an English major in Washington, DC. Afterward, I went to San Francisco for a year of HealthCorps (!) on a homeless medical van. Now I'm doing round two in New York. This spring, I’m excited to be returning to the world of ultimate Frisbee after a two-year hiatus.

What is your hometown?
Newbury, New Hampshire

What is the best part about living in NYC? What is your favorite place in the city?
I love what people read on the subway here. A selection spotted recently: Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, The Autobiography of Malcom X (twice!), Joyce's Ulysses, and countless other weathered jacketless hardbacks. In addition to those toting the usual stuff (anonymous tablets, free dailies, whichever vampire series is pandemic at the moment) there are people wrestling with some pretty big questions right there on the platform. Maybe I'm a book snob and maybe it's really the same in every city, but in my anecdotal experience New York is literarily where it's at.

As for favorite place… the Strand! Also, I visited Inwood Hill Park at the northern tip of Manhattan last week, and that was pretty darn pretty.

Where do you work and what kind of tasks do you do each day?
I work in the Institute’s homeless clinics, which are in church basements, soup kitchens, and drop-in centers in a few different Manhattan neighborhoods – Morningside Heights, Upper West Side, Chelsea, and Chinatown. Most of my time is spent working with our patients to fill prescriptions, apply for Medicaid, and (when feasible) decipher the reams of jargony administrative papers they receive as part of maintaining their benefits.

What is your favorite part of the job?
The stories! It's one of the strange, sometimes uncomfortable privileges of working in a clinic that you get your own little window into other lives.

What is the most difficult part of what you do?
With only about an ounce of irony, I’d have to go with trying to pry patient records from the jaws of the medical correspondence departments of certain NYC hospitals.

Why do you enjoy being a healthcorps member?
I love being part of a cohort of smart, excited people with similar interests. I also love everything about our team meetings - the speakers, the conversations, the time for reflection. I wish every job had that kind of thing built into it.

What do you want to be when you grow up?
Indecision endures – but public space and housing rights are, for the moment, supplanting health justice as the shadowy central themes of my career day dreams.