BNHC is a non-profit community health center that was created in 1992 providing services from a mobile medical van, until the health care needs of the community led to the construction of a facility for the health center. It serves low-income, diverse, medically underserved patients.

Brockton Neighborhood Health Center is a CDC Federally Qualified Community Health Center in Brockton, Massachusetts.  We serve more than 33,000 patients and provide more than 200,000 visits annually.  Services include primary care for all ages, dental, ob/gyn, social services, mental health, substance use disorder treatment, pharmacy, and nutrition.  BNHC has a main full service site, a small primary care site at the local homeless shelter, and our newest site, which offers adult primary care and nutrition. The new site, which opened in 2015, has a teaching kitchen and is attached to Vicente's Supermarket, a Cape Verdean grocery store, and has a teaching kitchen.  Our 2 registered dieticians offer cooking classes to BNHC patients and to the public.  They also participate in shared medical/nutrition visits where a primary care provider teams up with the dietician to offer group medical visits, nutrition education, and cooking classes.  Participants in the cooking classes are also taken to the market to teach them to read labels and choose healthy foods.  BNHC collaborates with the market to promote healthy food purchases through multi-lingual signage. 
 
The partnership with Vincente’s Property, LLC sought to use CED-HFFI funds to develop a full-size grocery store in a 34,000 square foot facility on a site previously abandoned by a regional grocery chain. The grocery store would bring a full-range of products to consumers in the area, focusing on creating healthy food access and tapping into local suppliers. By helping to establish a grocery store targeting an ethnically diverse population, BNHC sought to successfully meet the needs of a densely populated urban community facing food desert shopping constraints. BHNC had also conducted a nutrition and healthy food access tour of the existing site in preparation for this project. This project is projected to create 40 full-time positions and leverage $13,945,000 from U.S. Treasury HFFI awardees.
 
Federal HFFI Program
Agency: HHS, Office of Community Services, Community Economic Development Program
Fiscal Year 2014, $800,000