The Whitefoord Story
In 1994, Dr. George W. Brumley and his former student Dr. Veda Johnson opened a health clinic inside Whitefoord Elementary school to address the healthcare needs of children and families in the Whitefoord Elementary School district in southeast Atlanta. Dr. Brumley knew that healthy children stayed in school and achieved more. Whitefoord soon grew beyond the school-based clinic to meet even more needs of children and families in the area.
In 1998, Dr. Brumley and his wife Jean launched the Child Development Program to improve the accessibility of quality pre-school education for the community’s youngest residents and improve the livelihoods of many of the community’s parents and caregivers. Today, access to early education and quality healthcare are known to be key “social determinants of health” and critical to advancing health equity on a local, state, and national level.
After 17 years of operating health centers only in schools, Whitefoord opened its first-ever Family Medical Center in the Kirkwood neighborhood in the fall of 2012. In 2020, Whitefoord opened the Whitefoord Health Center at the intersection of Whitefoord Avenue and Hosea Williams. Whitefoord Health Centers are Federally Qualified Health Centers dedicated to providing affordable and accessible primary family medical care, dental care, and behavioral health care in community settings.
Whitefoord also operates the Whitefoord Early Learning Academy, which provides childcare and early learning services in the former Whitefoord Elementary School building. In acknowledging the needs of our patients and families over the past 29 years, our services have evolved to address the important issues of decreased access to health care, early childhood development and stimulation, quality after school programs, and social mobility.
OUR MISSION
Our mission is to create health equity by delivering patient-centered health services complemented by other programs, especially early education, that address the social determinants of health.
OUR VISION
Our vision is equitable access to health for all people, especially children.
Values
At Whitefoord, we are a non-profit organization and public charity. Our values are:
EXCELLENCE. We believe excellence is achieved through service, hard work, competency, quality, consistency, and use of evidence-based practices in our work.
INTEGRITY. Acting with integrity means being honest, acting with accountability, exhibiting humility and fairness, doing things for the right reasons and doing as you say you will do.
COMMUNITY. Community means building a sense of connectedness, teamwork, support for one another, collaboration and creating alliances among participants, colleagues, and with the organization’s mission.
WELL-BEING. We believe that well-being and happiness/joy are central to life, and for our staff, that comes from serving others with compassion and in ways that honor our diversity.
EQUITY. We can create equity in the world by providing support to those who have been offered less opportunity and fostering an environment of respect in which we affirm the dignity of all community members.