About_Basic
Established in 2004, the Geiger Gibson Program in Community Health Policy is named in honor of[FJ1] Drs. H. Jack Geiger and Count Gibson, pioneers in community health practice and tireless advocates for civil and human rights. Over 50 years ago, Geiger and Gibson founded the nation's first community health centers in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, and Boston, Massachusetts. In 2020, over 1,400 health centers, operating in more than 13,500 urban and rural sites, served almost 29 million medically underserved people.
Located within the GW Milken Institute School of Public Health, Department of Health Policy and Management, the Geiger Gibson Program aims to provide a deeper understanding of how policies can be used to advance health equity. Our chief focus is on community health centers, one of the most compelling examples of how health policy can be used to advance health equity for the nation’s most medically underserved urban and rural communities. Geiger Gibson also helps illuminate the challenges and opportunities facing community health centers today.
Founded with generous gifts from community health centers and state and regional primary care associations, Geiger Gibson is the nation’s academic home for community health centers. A major gift from the RCHN Community Health Foundation provides ongoing core support for the Program’s research, scholarship and educational activities.
Key Program Activities
- Research and Scholarship: The Geiger Gibson/RCHN Community Health Foundation Research Collaborative
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Through the Geiger Gibson/RCHN Community Health Foundation Research Collaborative, affiliated faculty and staff engage in wide-ranging research focusing on community health centers and medically underserved communities and populations.
- Academic education and training
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A core part of health policy education and training is a grounding in federal laws and policies that shape and influence health equity and health care access and how these laws have created and enabled community health centers to serve one in 11 Americans today. Key areas of study include the programs and laws of the Public Health Service Act, Medicaid, federal health professions programs, and the Affordable Care Act.
- Public policy education
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The Geiger Gibson Program engages in public policy education in a variety of settings, including seminars, webinars, roundtables, conference presentations, and public engagement with policymakers and the press.
- CHRONICLES
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Every community health center is unique. The CHroniCles project, an interactive, multimedia website dedicated to the living history of the community health center movement, began as a special joint project of the RCHN Community Health Foundation and the Geiger Gibson Program. CHroniCles has now become part of the Geiger Gibson program itself, a way of honoring the rich history of community health centers by enabling health center organizations to contribute their own stories to a dynamic, on-line, web-based tapestry.
CHroniCles documents the vibrant, varied, and important history of community health centers across the nation, as well as the health center movement as a whole. The website allows viewers everywhere to pay a virtual visit to community health centers and see the impact CHCs have had, and continue to have on their patients and communities.
Every health center story is unique. By providing health centers and primary care associations the opportunity to tell their own stories, CHroniCles celebrates – through written and oral histories, historic documents, photographs and other media – the special history of the health center movement and the vital role community health centers fulfill in American health care.
- Emerging Leaders
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The future of community health centers lies in its future leaders. Every year, the Geiger Gibson Program, in collaboration with the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC), and celebrates community health center and primary care association staff from across the country who already are demonstrating their leadership for their health centers, patients, and communities. The Emerging Leaders awards are presented during NACHC’s annual policy conference. Emerging Leaders represent the full range of people who make community health centers thrive, whether in central cities or frontier locations: clinicians, health educators, outreach and patient support staff, financial and information officers, and the primary care association staff who advocate on their behalf and provide vital training and education.
- Distinguished Visitors
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In order to provide students with the opportunity to learn from leaders in the field of community health and primary care, the Geiger Gibson Program regularly brings senior leaders from the community health centers and primary care associations to GW. During these visitorships, students can engage in both classroom and informal interaction with those whose careers have so significantly influenced their communities and the course of the community health centers program more generally.
- Geiger Gibson Perspectives
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Periodic blogs offer readers quick takes on key emerging issues in health laws and policies of high relevance to community health centers and the communities they serve.
