It started with a young mother and her sick child — and nowhere to go for help. The mother had no insurance and no money for doctors or medicine. When Dr. Daniel A. Nesi treated this child’s ear infection without charge, he knew that it was not an isolated case but part of a larger challenge facing our growing Doylestown community in the early 1990s: the lack of access to health care for the low income, uninsured.
 

Dr. Nesi, then the president of the Hospital Medical staff, worked with Rich Reif, Doylestown Hospital CEO. Reif’s own research confirmed that people who lost their jobs, their insurance, or their stable family situations often needed access to basic health care. The Emergency Department could provide episodic care, but not the on-going connection to family practitioners and specialists needed. The Hospital was founded on the Village Improvement Association mission to improve the quality of life in the Central Bucks community. Doing something about this community need in concert with the doctors became a way to further the mission.
 

Community leaders lent their support. The first major supporter was Ann Silverman, a longtime Doylestown resident and friend of Dr. Nesi. An active contributor of her time and talent to many community organizations, she provided early funding and became a member of the clinic's Board of Directors.
 

The doctors, under the guidance of Dr. Nesi, stood in concert with the Hospital to meet this community responsibility. The first clinic services were provided in 1994 on Tuesday evenings, staffed solely by volunteers. Dr. Joseph Shaeffer, a family practitioner, was present on that first Tuesday evening and continues to be one of the longest-serving volunteer doctors.
 

This successful launching of the Free Clinic rested on three pillars: the medical staff who volunteered, the Hospital that provided the institutional support and location, and the community leaders who embraced the mission and devoted their own resources. Dan Nesi, Rich Reif, and Ann Silverman were those pillars of medical professionals, hospital, and community. Following them is a generation of volunteers who championed the values on which the clinic was founded and guided its growth and evolution to what is has become. 
 

Dr. Nesi served, until his death in 2018, as a director and as the keeper and guardian of the Clinic mission. Rich Reif is a member of the Board of Directors and established lasting relationships among the medical staff, clinic, and the hospital. Ann Silverman’s role in providing community leadership was memorialized in 2008 when contributions from the Silverman family in her memory established an endowment for clinic services. The clinic’s name was changed that year to The Ann Silverman Community Health Clinic to recognize the significance of her early and lasting support.
 

The defining moment of a great institution is manifest when it brings people together in a common purpose and brings help to those who would otherwise be helpless.