Free clinic to start expansion

Hardworking people line up outside the Caridad Center’s doors on weekday mornings.

Uninsured landscapers, construction workers, roofers, the self-employed and others show up at Palm Beach County’s largest free clinic at 8645 W. Boynton Beach Blvd. to receive health services by hundreds of volunteer doctors and dentists.

But the health clinic has run out of space. So construction will start this month to expand the center, allowing it to serve an additional 3,000 uninsured patients. There will be new meeting rooms, sterilization rooms, dental rooms, exam rooms and an eye clinic.

The goal: to help more people. “It’s overcrowded,” said Connie Berry, cofounder of the Caridad Center. “We’ve converted every closet we had into an office, because there is no room.”

The health center will stay at its current location, but will more than double its size, by adding 11,000 square feet to the 7,000-square-foot main facility. The expansion project is expected to be completed in the fall of 2016.

The center sees more than 25,000 patients a year, but Berry says there’s more work to do.

“We have more doctors and dentists that want to volunteer and we can’t accommodate them,” she said. “It really is a crime.”

The expansion is being funded, in part, through nearly $4 million in donations from people across the country. The center estimates it will need about another $1 million to complete the project, so it is still seeking donations.

The Caridad Center opened in 1992 in a double-wide trailer at Boynton Beach Boulevard and U.S. 441 as an after-school program. It was started by Berry and the late Caridad Asensio.

Berry and Asensio worked together at Hagan Ranch Elementary in West Boynton Beach in the ’80s and opened the Caridad Health Clinic to help kids succeed in school.

“The whole reason for the center was that I saw that kids couldn’t learn in school if they had an earache or toothache, “Berry said. “I saw the kids’ parents and they were sick, too.”

That idea blossomed into what it is today: a network of more than 400 doctors in Palm Beach County helping the county’s working poor, free of charge.

Delray Beach-based surgeon and dermatologist Dr. John Strassweimmer volunteers at the Caridad Center twice a month.

With the expansion, Strassweimmer said he and other doctors will be able to work with more people.

“The expansion will allow me to treat twice as many people,” he said. aanthony@tribpub.com, 561-243-6648 or @attiyya_sun