GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. (KJCT) – Employment, housing, and healthcare are vital life threads that many often struggle to find.
“83,000,000 Americans today lack sufficient access to primary care,” said Ashley Chrisity, Chief Operating Officer for OnMed.
This is also seen on the Western Slope. Micah Espinoza, President & CEO of the Freedom Institute, said he’s worked with many recently incarcerated individuals who struggle to find access to these necessities.
“They have all of the basic needs that everybody else has,” said Espinoza.
Over the last few years, Espinoza has worked closely with community partners to slowly close that gap. The Freedom Institute is a Grand Junction-based organization working to help those recovering from addiction or incarceration rebuild their lives.
“Our mission is to break the general cycle of poverty and incarceration in forgotten communities,” said Espinoza. “We meet those needs by providing targeted case management, supportive housing, and social enterprise employment training. And then we do recovery services, and then finally, the fifth thing that we do is we do community organization and advocacy work at a policy level.”
The Freedom Institute has served over 300 people annually. Now, it’s expanding, in the hopes of spreading its impact across the country. Freedom Industries is an expansion of the institute, organized to help employ many of these individuals. According to Espinoza, it’s made possible by Colorado’s WAGES Initiative (Work and Gain Education and Employment Skills). WAGES was established in 2014 by House Bill 14-1355.
“That’s a house bill that essentially moves money in statute out of the Department of Corrections budget and reinvested it into community partners to help returning citizens who are returning from prison to the community across Colorado,” said Espinoza.
In partnership with LadaBuild, Freedom Industries hopes to address the healthcare and housing crisis with a product Espinoza calls the “two-by-four of the future”.
“We could build houses, we could build products; I mean the same way that you could build a million different things with two-by-fours, we could build a million different things with the cassettes that we build,” he said.
These cassettes are developed by LadaBuild and require only an alan wrench to construct. With this infrastructure, Freedom Industries has worked alongside OnMed, a tech-based healthcare organization, to build medical pods. Ashley Christy said these blend traditional care with tele-health.
“The care station experience includes a full consultation exam and a customized treatment plan for each patient that comes in,” said Christy. “We want our patients to feel that they’re receiving the highest quality of care in the most respectable manner.”
Christy said the medical pods are designed for a simple process: collecting demographic information and medical history, collecting vitals (heart rate, blood pressure, etc.), and speaking with licensed clinicians. Patients with or without insurance can use these pods at any time to receive physical and mental care.
“Being able to bring awareness to the communities and to our patients that we serve of their health conditions, but allowing them and enabling them to take control over their health has been one of the most satisfying pieces,” said Christy.
Freedom Industries is contracted to build 60 medical pods for OnMed. Moving forward, Espinoza now advocates for using this infrastructure to build interim housing.
“We envision a property where the homeless people, people out of prison, can come. They can get a place to live, they can get a job, they can get healthcare, mental healthcare, as well as case management and guidance to really kind of be part of the solution,” said Espinoza.
Those employed by Freedom Industries are using this opportunity as a chance to also rebuild their lives.
“If you truly believe in what you’re doing and you do it for the right reasons, things have a way of falling into place,” said Espinoza.
Espinoza and Christy look forward to an ever-growing partnership.
“I’m really excited about that for the future. For OnMed, Lada and Freedom,” said Christy.
Espinoza currently meets with local organizations and the City of Grand Junction to brainstorm a way to use this infrastructure and team to build interim housing communities.
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