Gloria Gates Care co-founder Zane Gates (center) speaks with Altoona Housing Authority Executive Director Cheryl Johns (right) and Deputy Executive Director Brad Kanuch after receiving a Pennsylvania Association of Housing and Redevelopment Authorities Bellamy Award for the establishment of the Gloria Gates Care Clinic. Mirror photo by William Kibler

The Altoona Housing Authority was recently recognized by the Pennsylvania Association of Housing and Redevelopment Authorities with that organization’s highest award for outstanding achievement.

The AHA received one of two Bellamy Awards for 2024 from the PAHRA for the local authority’s establishment of the new Gloria Gates Care Clinic in the Green Avenue Tower, serving Medicaid recipients who live there and in nearby 11th Street Tower.

Gloria Gates Care co-founder Zane Gates in turn was presented with the Bellamy plaque from the PAHRA by the AHA board at its meeting this month, during which Gates deflected praise.

“That’s your award,” Gates told authority officials. “You’ve fought that good fight. Housing is as important as health care: you can’t have one without the other.”

The partnership represented by the clinic includes not only the authority and Gloria Gates Care, but other care providers, insurers and a variety of local agencies, according to the PAHRA website.

The Gates clinic practices “whole-person care,” dealing not only with patients’ medical needs, like primary care, testing, screening, pharmacy, labs and physical and behavioral therapy, but also four social determinants of their health: education access and quality; neighborhood and the built environment; social and community context; and economic stability, according to the website.

In connection with those social determinants, low-income people tend to experience lots of friction, which keeps them from getting the health care they need, according to information provided by Gates for a previous Mirror story.

Examples of that friction include transportation hassles for people who don’t own cars and difficulties getting accepted into primary care practices, since low Medicaid reimbursements for doctors make it unaffordable for the practices to take many of those patients, Gates has said.

The clinic helps the Towers’ low-income senior and disabled residents “rise above the challenges that they face in their daily lives,” the PAHRA website states.

The clinic and other programs he’s led during his career as a physician represent “a long journey to take care of people the world deems less,” said Gates, who was raised in the Evergreen Manors housing project by a single mother, for whom his programs are named.

Authority Deputy Executive Director Brad Kanuch nominated the authority and its new clinic for the Bellamy Award.

“I’m going to be there (at the clinic) tomorrow,” Kanuch told Gates, as Gates was leaving with the plaque. “It (the plaque) better be up.”

The Johnstown Housing Authority received the other 2024 Bellamy Award for a training and employment program.

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.