A new book chronicles the efforts of a 20-year-old city man with no college degree but plenty of ambition who founded a community health center, eventually expanding its footprint from Connecticut to all 50 states .
“Peace and Health,” explores how a group of small-town activists and college students set out to transform healthcare, a Middletown-based nonprofit organization founded in the early 1970s by CEO Mark Masselli.
Masselli, also the president, is a member of the hippie generation who, along with his peers, was intent on bringing the free clinic movement to the city.
The primary care agency marked its 50th year of service on 1 May. It has come a long way from its beginnings in a small, two-room medical and dental clinic located in a former apartment at 115 College St.
The 164-page book details the clinic’s gripping history as Masselli’s dream as “one of the nation’s most innovative health centers,” according to author Charles Barber, Wesleyan University associate professor in the College of Letters. and lecturer in psychiatry for the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven.
For the first decade after the Community Health Center was established, the author said, “It was absolutely touch-and-go.”
The book is filled with old photographs, newspaper articles, documents, and daily notes from Masselli, who had no credentials to perform administrative or clinical work at the time, wrote the author.
However, Masselli told The Press, “What 20-year-old doesn’t want to conquer the world?”
The main office is now located at 635 Main Street, with a Knowledge and Technology Center at the corner of 19 Grand St.
According to Barber, fifty years ago, Masselli joined a group of Wesleyan students who founded TOUCH Inc. to provide support for youth runaways, drug counseling, draft counseling and a 24/7 crisis line. established a drop-in center called It was located in a donated space at a Middletown Episcopal church, and later the Cary Plumbing & Heating Company, an old “ramshackle” store at 635 Main St.
He told The Press that Maisel’s efforts, including camping outside Cary for three cold days in October, were “out of desperation”.
According to the book the North End was perfect for a “rebooted version of CHC”. “It was ‘undesirable’ and in a poorer part of town… away from the crosshairs of the medical establishment.”
The founder had set his sights on securing the building, which he believed was not being used regularly. When he consulted with the owner of the building, he was told that the tenant owed rent, so he agreed to retrieve the keys for the young man if he could, as the tenant had changed the locks.
“I went there every day: 9 a.m., 12 p.m., 5 p.m. I saw some supplies go out, but I was here all the time; ‘It’s not possible,'” he thought. The plan worked.
Part of CHC’s portfolio now includes the National Institute for Medical Assistant Advancement in Denver as well as locations in California.
“So many people helped us on that journey to make health care affordable for those locked down in lockdown,” Masselli said. This sentiment is reflected in the Health Center’s motto: “Health care is a right, not a privilege.”
As a native who grew up on Pine Street, Barber has many ties to Middletown and Wesleyan. His father, like Masselli (a chemist at the university), was a professor. Both also graduated from Xavier High School.
Masselli had approached Barber with the idea of a book about two years earlier. “I didn’t know what I was in for,” he said of CHC’s labor-intensive history.
Source – middletownpress