Outreach Mission: Street Medicine with Nina Wright
Grace Episcopal Outreach Mission Spotlight
Bonus content on the Glimpses of Grace podcast feed
Welcome to the next episode of the Grace Episcopal Outreach Mission Spotlight, a new series on the Glimpses of Grace podcast highlighting community partners supported by the Grace Episcopal Outreach Ministry in Gainesville and Hall County, Georgia. Each episode features local organizations making a measurable impact through service, advocacy, and compassionate support.
Street Medicine with Nina Wright: Caring for Gainesville’s Most Vulnerable Neighbors
What does it look like when a community refuses to look away from its most vulnerable neighbors? In this episode, Bruce Leyton sits down with Nina Wright, registered nurse and clinical operations director at Good News Clinics, to explore the heart behind Gainesville’s Unity Project Street Medicine clinic.
Born out of the closure of the Flat Creek homeless encampment — home to nearly 300 unhoused individuals — Street Medicine operates every Wednesday morning at the Unity Project shelter on Dorsey Street, offering free walk-in healthcare to anyone who walks through the door, no insurance required.
Nina shares how a small but dedicated team of volunteers — nurses and everyday people alike — provides primary care, chronic disease management, medications, and now psychiatry services to some of Gainesville’s most overlooked neighbors. Powered by a partnership with Northeast Georgia Health Systems and deeply rooted in the mission of Good News Clinics, Street Medicine is more than a clinic — it’s a lifeline.
Along the way, Nina shares a story of one patient’s remarkable journey from open heart surgery to housing and employment — a story that captures exactly why this work matters.
“If we make a difference in the life of one person that needs so much help and so much love and so much support — that is a good work day.” — Nina Wright
Guest: Nina Wright, RN, Clinical Operations Director, Good News Clinics
Host: Bruce Leyton, Grace Episcopal Church Outreach Committee
Learn about Unity Project Gainesville at on their Facebook and Instagram accounts
Learn more about Grace Episcopal Outreach Ministry.
The Glimpses of Grace podcast is a ministry of Grace Episcopal Church in Gainesville, Georgia. We are passionate about supporting the spiritual growth of souls, and we hope these sermons and conversations meet you where you are and enrich your soul as we all continue to make meaning in the world today.
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Transcript
Bruce: Welcome to the Grace Church podcast series, Outreach Ministry, Spotlight on. This series is dedicated to amplifying the voices of those in need and shining a light on the community agencies who walk alongside them with compassion and commitment. Grace Church’s outreach ministry provides both financial support and volunteer engagement to organizations across Hall County, partnering with them to strengthen initiatives that promote dignity, stability, and community well-being.
Bruce: I am Bruce Leyton, a parishioner at Grace Episcopal and a member of the outreach committee. And the purpose of today’s discussion is to create a space to look beneath the surface of our community partnerships and to delve into the deeply personal nature of the work and the way lives are touched and transformed. And with me today is Nina Wright. Nina is a registered nurse and a part of the leadership team at Good News Clinics, a free and charitable clinic here in Hall County. And one of your many roles as clinical operations director is to lead the Street Medicine Clinic that provides free healthcare, dental care, and medications to unhoused persons in Gainesville. And that sounds like a lot of work, Nina, based on what I know. I’m going to read one more thing. It’s from Michael Fisher’s Facebook post. Michael, who heads up Unity Project. Nina administers the Unity Project’s medical clinic, coordinating medical providers, nurses, and administrators in a caring symphony of compassion for our most vulnerable neighbors. And this is a massive task that she excels in and the community benefits from.
Nina: Wow. I know you can’t see me when I’m blushing.
Bruce: That’s that’s okay. It sounds like you’re deserving of the accolades. So, I thought maybe we could start the narrative with the story about, if I’m not mistaken, the Flat Creek homeless camp. And there are some 300 people. If you could, could we follow that story from what happened and then what is Street Meds and how does Street Meds factor into that story?
Nina: Absolutely. Thank you for that introduction. That was a lot. I appreciate that so much and from Mike as well. Yes, happy to start with the encampment. I came on with Good News in January of this year, so I’m the newbie on the team. But as part of that role, how it came to be actually is because I was volunteering with Good News in November and Street Medicine had started through Liz Coates, my executive director at Good News, and Mike Fisher and other team members that saw the need to have street medicine. And I’ll go into what that really means in just a moment.
Nina: But it came about because this one particular encampment was closing. And the community, the governing agents of Hall County got together and said, we need to do something. So, the Unity Project was started and part of this Unity Project is the shelter that is housed on Dorsey Street. And that is in front of Good News at Noon, which is another resource for the community. There’s a shelter there, they provide food, they provide resources. It is separate from Good News Clinics.
Nina: But the shelter then, folks, our friends and neighbors that were unhoused were able to come to the shelter and we, of course, want to give them all of the resources available that we can and give them love and give them understanding and give them a place of belongingness through the Unity Project. And in that, Mike Fisher and his team are providing this coordination of resources, which involve healthcare, work-based learning, community service, recruiters, just all of the resources to help them get back on their feet and into the community. Living resources, rehabilitation services if needed.
Nina: So, Good News Clinics is one of those resources to provide medical care. This was the community members involving Mike Fisher, who leads the Unity Project, Dr. Paul Klas, who is a physician with NGPG and Northeast Georgia Health Systems, and he is one of the faculty of the residency program there, and Liz Coates. So they came together and started it. And again, I was volunteering and Liz approached me about coming on board with Good News Clinics and I could not say no.
Nina: The mission and the focus and the vision of Good News Clinics and Street Medicine just lured me in. Street Medicine itself is a medical clinic that serves the unhoused population. And Street Medicine goes way back. There’s all kinds of Street Medicine clinics throughout the United States, unfortunately, because we have so many unhoused neighbors, but fortunately because we can provide those services. Street Medicine has a history of medical professionals going into the encampments and just saying, “hey, who needs medical care?”
Nina: We did not want to do that, of course, because the goal is to get our neighbors out of the encampments. And so we, Good News Clinics, have a team that goes to the Unity Project shelter and we provide the services there. So that’s the background that I have on Street Medicine.
Bruce: So tell me something about the intake of somebody that comes to seek help with Street Meds.
Nina: We’re inside the shelter. So the shelter has truly a overnight shelter. They have residents that are able to live there for a short period of time. Most of the time it’s 30 days. There’s certain rules and regulations they have to follow. There’s a common area and there’s short-term just overnight type shelter with cots. The residents have beds and there’s restrooms and all of that.
Nina: And then there’s just a room, an old office really, that’s where we are normally housed. And so I get there every Wednesday morning and I have to bring all the medications and bins and we have a special place for those and I have a group of volunteers, most of them from Grace. Some of them are RNs, some of them are not healthcare professionals, they’re retired, and they’re part of that intake team.
Nina: So, how folks get there, word of really word of mouth. Mike Fisher does a tremendous job in telling the community and in telling our unhoused neighbors, hey, we have this resource for you. You can get free healthcare. And we continuously, every time that we’re there, we have anywhere between 7 to 12 patients that come through. And we’re only there from 8:30 until about 11:30. So in a 3-hour period, we’re seeing that many patients.
Nina: And that is a feat in itself because they’re fearful. They’re told it’s free, but sometimes the trust is not there and so is it really going to be free? They have a lot of questions.
Nina: What happens with Street Med is that any person that comes to our intake table and says, I want to see the doctor today, they can see them. It does not matter any of their history, social history, if they have healthcare benefits or not. We see VA veterans, we see people with insurance that have Medicare and Medicaid, but they’re unhoused. And so they’re at the Unity shelter, they’re just passing by for the day because there’s a common area, the lunch is served there every day. And so they’ll just kind of hang out or maybe they’re residents there.
Nina: So regardless, with Street Med, the beauty is that regardless of where they are, anywhere in regards to having insurance, we can provide that care. We have folks that will tell us, I have an appointment with my family medicine doctor at NGPG next week, but my meds, my medications were stolen last night and I can’t go without my blood pressure or my medication or my insulin for one more week. So we provide that right there on site.
Bruce: I’m thinking about acuity of care and the cases that walk in. So it sounds like maybe nothing too dramatic, but a population that needs to be served that is underserved and needs immediate care, if you will, kind of an urgent care for those that are unhoused, if you will.
Nina: That is correct. And for those volunteers that want to work with this community and are not they don’t have healthcare experience, yes, so there’s what I call the intake team. And so it’s the registration of the patient. The patient, just like any anywhere else at a doctor’s office, I’m here to see the doctor. Signing on the clipboard, we look them up in the system, are they already in the electronic healthcare record, which is Epic. We use we have that connection. Able to look them up. Yeah.
Bruce: So you use Epic.
Nina: Good News Good News Clinics uses Epic. We have that gift from the hospital. We have a great partnership with the hospital and so we use Epic and so if the patient was in the hospital yesterday or last week, we’re able to look all that, all of their history up. So that’s very helpful.
Bruce: And we’re talking about, again, we’re talking about Unity Project and somebody coming to.
Nina: Yes, sir.
Bruce: Yeah, the Street Medicine.
Nina: That is correct. Yeah.
Bruce: At Street.
Nina: Yeah. So we just we bring our laptops and right there we look them up and then we just schedule their appointment right there and then. Like an urgent care you mentioned, it’s basically walk-ins. Really is for anything. It’s for any type of pain and chronic diseases. We see a lot of hypertension, a lot of diabetes. Another great point, and I don’t think I had shared this with you, is that this past Wednesday, for the first time, we had our psychiatry team.
Nina: So we have Dr. Samuel Dotson, who is the head or if not one of the heads of the psychiatry program at Northeast Georgia Health Systems, and he has been a volunteer physician at Good News Clinics and so he, him and his residents are starting rotations specifically at Street Medicine. And so now we’re able to provide that service, psychiatry and family or primary care medicine to all of the folks that come to Street Medicine.
Bruce: So tell me something about the people that you see.
Nina: I’ll share one or two of the stories that have really touched us. And we share these in meetings, in staff meetings, board meetings, we call it the mission moment. And it’s those stories that really help with just truly telling the narrative of why we’re here. It’s that one person that you made a difference for and it makes all the difference, right? We wish that we could help everybody and solve all the problems.
Nina: I want to, I truly want to solve world hunger. I just really do in my lifetime. Maybe I will, we’ll see, but we, right now we can’t do that.
Nina: But so a couple of questions that you asked me, with continuity of care, specific to healthcare, the goal is that if a person is coming brand new from an encampment or another city, we have folks that say, I just got off a bus from Florida. Great. We have folks that were incarcerated that come to us that don’t have a place to go. They will tell us, I got out of prison yesterday. So they’re not all coming from encampment. And so they’re re-establishing themselves into the community. And of course, one of those important things is to have healthcare, right? You need housing, you need food, you need healthcare.
Nina: So we’re providing that continuity of care because they’re coming to us at Street Medicine right there at the Unity Project. We are signing them up, doing that eligibility application for Good News. If they qualify, then they have that continuity of care at Good News Clinics. They can continue to see us at urgent at the kind of those urgent visits, walk-in visits through Street Med, but then they have a primary care provider at Good News.
Nina: And then at Good News, the clinic itself, they come in and they establish care, they get dental care, they get all their medications, all of those things that they need, right? So it’s a beautiful thing. It’s just, it’s such a blessing.
Bruce: That is fantastic. Yeah, we’re going to share some particular stories?
Nina: Yes, those that just bring us to tears. One of the first stories that I have early on, this was probably January or February, we had a gentleman that had open heart surgery and he was unhoused when he went into the hospital and he was in the hospital, open heart surgery, critical care, he had complications, so he was there a minimum of 30 days. And when he was discharged, he had nowhere to go. So he came to Street Medicine or to the Unity Project.
Nina: We, when we saw him that first day, he was not doing well. We almost sent him back to the hospital, but he didn’t want to go and we started taking care of him. He didn’t need, he had so many medications, he didn’t know what to do with them. So we literally just sat down with him. One of our volunteers sat down with him and put his medications in pill boxes and told him what he needed to take and just again, helping, seeing, letting them know that they belong and that we care, it just goes such a long way, right? Just a little bit of love that Jesus has told us to give to our neighbors and it’s just those little things that make a difference.
Nina: And so we did that and we started a plan of care for him. I’ll make it short and sweet to say that in about 30 days, he was able to get housing and that is totally on Mike and all of the other resources that are there. We have nothing to do with that, but again, it’s the community coming together. So he had a place to live.
Nina: He found a job as a janitor in a factory. He wanted to work, able to work, he’s not of retirement age and he wanted to lift and do things, but because of his open heart surgery, he had limitations, but he could do janitorial work and he was very happy about that. He moved into his residence, he got off his feet, all his meds were in order, he’s a patient at Good News Clinics, so he has continuity of care.
Nina: And we didn’t see him for a few days and we’re like, what’s going on? Or two weeks actually, sorry, two weeks. And then he showed up and just wanted to say to all of us at Street Medicine, what a difference we had made in his life and he hugs all of us and we hugged him back. We have a picture with him, of course, we can’t share anyway, but yeah, that was the first truly touching story that we pray and hope for and give glory to God and to a group of people that have come together to truly help.
Bruce: It’s amazing. Yeah. So, I think it’s probably a good place to wrap up, right? With a story like that.
Nina: Sounds great. Yeah, let’s yeah, let’s finish on a high. Let’s take that with us all day, right? It’s inspirational. You know, one of my questions was going to be, how do you measure the success of the program? But that’s it. That’s the mission moment right there. You can look at all the numbers in the world.
Nina: That’s right. Teachers and educators have seen a sign everywhere. It’s become a GIF and it says, “if you make a difference in the life of one child, that’s it. That’s all that matters.” And I think here for I can I I think I can speak for the whole team, certainly for myself, that if we do make a difference in the life of one person that needs so much help and so much love and so much support, then that’s I am grateful for that and that is a good it’s a good work day.
Bruce: Yeah, we talked about kind of the view of the existential problems that we face, but when it comes down to it, the work is done in the community, right? As you’ve just done. It takes a few people that care. Yeah. And I heard that word care, caring, and I also heard the word belong and belonging. And you’ve created a wonderful community there at Unity Project and with Street Meds and the kind of the link in terms of continuity of care to what the future can hold for these individuals and availability of care and access to care through Good News Clinics.
Bruce: Yeah. So, thank you for that. I’m going to share a short comment on behalf of Grace Church. Grace Episcopal Church is a congregation in communion with all that is God, seen and unseen. We are led by the example of Jesus Christ and are empowered by the Holy Spirit to support each other through prayer, formation, worship, and service. We will welcome all with kindness, acceptance, and love with God’s help, and we are grace grounded in faith and relentless in compassion.
Nina: In compassion. That’s right. We say that every Sunday, don’t we? Amen to that. Yes. Amen to that. Nina, I want to thank you so much for being with us.
Nina: Yes, sir. Thank you for having me.