A partnership between a south Minneapolis health care center and law firm has helped Minneapolis residents for almost 30 years now.
Community-University Health Care Center (CUHCC) opened in 1966, with University of Minnesota Medical School professors wanting to provide care to low-income community members, refugees and immigrants. Their partnership with Stinson, LLP started in 1993, when a son of one of the law firm’s founders became the CEO at CUHCC.
“He had seen that in many of the clinic’s patients medicine treatment and medicine itself wasn’t necessarily solving all of the issues, especially in regards to patients whose living conditions were so poor that it was affecting their health,” said Tim Sanders Szabo, the manager of the Deinard Legal Clinic and an attorney with Stinson.
The legal clinic’s office is right outside of CUHCC’s building in Minneapolis’ Phillips neighborhood. When patients express a need – or if a situation seems like it might benefit from a lawyer, staff at the health center fill out a referral form and send it to the legal clinic to make that connection.
“As a clinician, if I’m seeing a patient and during their interaction I figured out, ‘Oh they are in an unsafe situation’ and I’m trying to explore their safety … then I’ll call my advocate and my advocate will take it from there. They will do a diagnostic assessment of their situation and then they will end up making the referral or connection to the legal clinic,” said Dr. Roli Dwivedi, the CEO of CUHCC.
In 2022, the health care center had 9,945 patients of more than 12 different ethnic groups. Around 21% of their patients are uninsured and 55% have some form of public insurance.
“I have a lot of patients who come here for one or the other reason and they are either trying to stay here to support their family or I see a lot of patients who are in domestic abuse situations and are seeking asylum. Other things like housing situations; we know housing and health is connected. So people experiencing homelessness or getting evicted,” Dwivedi said. “The help that we get from this partnership is just huge for huge, huge, huge for my patients.”
The legal clinic has helped CUHCC patients with areas of law like immigration and family law, landlord/tenant law, social security appeals and guardianships.
“It might be someone looking for assistance to file to become a citizen to naturalize. It might be a situation where someone’s recent arrival here to the United States, they don’t really know what options they have. Maybe they’re afraid to return to their home country, they’ve gotten a hearing at immigration court,” Sanders Szabo said.
This year, they’ve received between 130-140 referrals from the health center, according to Sanders Szabo and they’re on track to at least double their referral clients compared to last year, he said.
Health connections
Dwivedi has seen the health benefits of these referrals. She recalled a patient at the clinic whose husband was unable to stay in the country – causing the patient lots of distress since she relied on the husband for a lot of interpreting and daily life needs.
“When she heard that he will be leaving because he just cannot stay here, she got super depressed. She stopped taking her diabetes medication; her diabetes got worse. She started showing up to the ER more,” Dwivedi said. “Once we started making those connections and got help for her husband … when everything got fixed and he was able to live here, she’s a different person now. Her diabetes is well controlled; she follows up on her on all her primary things. She is seeing the dentist; her mental health is well controlled, she’s not going to the ER … It’s reducing the total cost of care, it’s improving the chronic diseases, probably her life expectancy is more now. And she is much happier and healthier.”
Recently, the legal clinic has seen an uptick in immigration cases compared to past years, with between 60-70% of recent referral cases being immigration law, according to Sanders Szabo. Madina Osman is a patient at CUHCC. She and her family have been going to the clinic since arriving in the U.S. in 2016. After failing her naturalization test, her family was at a loss for what to do, her husband Mohamed Ahmed said.
“I’m very, very frustrated. What we can do, we don’t know?” Ahmed said.
Ahmed, who is also a patient at the health care center, told one of his doctors about this stressor during a therapy appointment. During that appointment, the therapist referred him to the legal services.
From there, Ahmed remembers Sanders Szabo calling him. “He gave us hope,” Ahmed said.
The legal clinic appealed the negative decision, and it was overturned in August. Osman’s oath ceremony to become a U.S. citizen will be in late September.
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