Street Medicine Team at the Berkeley Free Clinic

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Street Medicine Team at the Berkeley Free Clinic

The BFC Street Medicine Team uses a mutual aid model to provide medical care & support to folks experiencing homelessness.

We work from a harm-reduction philosophy, providing free services to any client without eligibility screening, no questions asked.

05/29/2025

SMT is seeking volunteers! LINK IN BIO. Previous healthcare experience not required!

02/19/2024

IRC (Information Resource Collective) just opened up application for a new training cohort! Yay!!!! Application deadline is 11:59 PM on April 7th, 2024.

Being a part of IRC is a great way to get introduced to the clinic and to be involved in harm reduction without necessarily providing direct medical services.

You can access our application easily - it’s on tinyurl.com/ircapp2024. You can also scan the QR code on the flier to access it.

We’d love to do more outreach to community-based organizations. If you have any in mind that we should reach out to, please let us know!

01/04/2024

UPDATE: Deadline extended to Jan 14th! Join our team!
Tuberculosis Testing Section (TTS) is looking for individuals who are kind, compassionate and enjoy serving in their community. If you are ready to learn a new skill and help strengthen and grow the most requested service at Berkeley Free Clinic, we'd love to hear from you!
Applications are due Sunday January 7th, 2023 at 11:59pm. Apply here: tinyurl.com/2024tts

We support our community through affordable and accessible TB testing and by navigating our clients through follow-up care after a positive result.

Our services include:
TB (PPD) skin tests,
setting up free blood (Quantiferon) tests, and
helping to navigate clients through follow-up care after a positive result.

Our approach:
mutual aid based
community-focused
client-focused

We prioritize applicants from the communities we serve:
Q***r and trans folks,
poor folks,
people of color,
chronically ill,
neurodivergent,
disabled people,
people who use drugs,
s*x workers, and
HIV-positive folks.

Questions? Accommodations?

If you have any questions, please email us at tts-coords@berkeleyfreeclinic.org.

07/21/2022

Know anyone in need of rental assistance? Check out this info from .health ❤️

The Alameda County Housing Secure Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ACHS-ERAP) will help income-eligible households to pay rent and utilities, both for past and future payments! Swipe through to learn if you are eligible!

01/22/2022

Need someone to talk to? Give us a ring ✨

The BFC Peer Counseling Collective offers one-to-one, FREE, 30 minute phone counseling for you to express whatever you would like to. We do not judge, advise, diagnose, or prescribe. We are not clinicians, therapists, psychiatrists, or psychologists. We are trained volunteers from the community. Our model is based on Carl Rogers' approach. Since 1969, we are here to listen.

(510)270-0052 | Weekdays 6:30-8:30pm

01/17/2022

Narcan saves lives 🌸💕🌷

Check out for more amazing artwork ✨

Shoutout to our awesome community partners for their narcan distribution and training programs

oakland.punks.with.lunch

Know of any more resources? Drop em in the comments 👇👇👇

[Image: Beautiful pink flowers collaged onto a pink background. At the center of each flower, there is a case of Narcan. A butterfly perches on one of the flowers. White text reads: “Protect your community, carry Narcan. Narcan saves lives.”]

01/13/2022

“Harm reduction finds you at the intersection of love and science”🫀💓🧠

Beautiful artwork from ✨

Image description: Black and white line drawing of a person with long hair sitting down and leaning against an intricate backdrop. They are wearing a T shirt and combat boots and smoking a cigarette. Red lettering reads: “Harm reduction finds you at the intersection of love and science.”

01/07/2022

That’s that time of year! Come through 🔥🔥🔥

Signal boost from :

For the 8th consecutive year the Anti Police-Terror Project calls the Bay Area into the streets to Reclaim MLK's Radical Legacy! ✊🏾✊🏿✊🏽

🦠CHANGE OF PLANS😷 We thought we could march this year, but due to the uncontrolled spread of omicron and our government's failure to respond, we will have a car caravan again that will end with a drive-thru mutual aid giveaway organized by Community Ready Corps and MH First.

🚗🚙Join us to caravan and mourn the hundreds of lives we’ve lost to street violence in Oakland in just the last two years, as well as those we've lost at the hands of police throughout the Bay. 💔

In the radical spirit of Dr. King, we demand “an all-out war against poverty” and an end to violence through healing — not a war on people, not more police.

This year we will ride for ALL of us, to combine our struggles and heal together as a united community❤️‍🩹. One Struggle. One Fight. One People.

📍We will meet at the Port of Oakland near Middle Harbor Shoreline Park (2777 Middle Harbor Rd, Oakland, CA 94607). 💻Virtual events throughout MLK Weekend TBA.

🔗 RSVP for updates & more at bit.ly/reclaim-mlk-2022 🗓

01/05/2022

New year, new chance to support indigenous folks in taking back their land 🌞

Consider paying your Shuumi Land Tax for this year!

“The Shuumi Land Tax is a voluntary annual contribution that non-Indigenous people living on the Confederated Villages of Lisjan’s territory can make to support the critical work of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust.

The Shuumi Land Tax directly supports Sogorea Te’s work of rematriation, returning Indigenous land to Indigenous people, establishing a cemetery to reinter stolen Ohlone ancestral remains and building urban gardens, community centers, and ceremonial spaces so current and future generations of Indigenous people can thrive in the Bay Area. Shuumi means gift in the Ohlone language Chochenyo.”

https://sogoreate-landtrust.org/shuumi-land-tax/

Thank you to for the incredible artwork 💕

“Advocate for Indigenous rights. Preserve indigenous languages and traditions. Ensure food sovereignty, housing, clean air and water. Transfer public lands back to the hands of the rightful Indigenous owners. Land back!”

01/05/2022

Is anyone else finding themselves in this dilemma? How can we build a more sustainable future for public health?

Twitter thread text:

🧵As a radical collective that provides essential public health services, there's an interesting dilemma that occurs for us. Public health in the U.S. is obviously chronically underfunded. A lot of the work BFC does - mass vaccination, STI testing/treatment, TB testing...
..sometimes even case finding, contact tracing, and responding to outbreaks - should in fact be done by our local health department. Berkeley for some obscure reason has its own DPH independent of Alameda County's, which probably doesn't help their lack of funding and staff.

It's nice to get your public health needs met by harm reductionist anarchists who won't be stigmatizing as****es or act like public health cops. That being said: what happens when your disorganized mutual aid group does a good enough job of providing an essential service...
..that the government agency that's supposed to do that job divests from it even more? The Berkeley DPH dramatically scaled back the services it offers at the Ann Chandler public health clinic, including discontinuing s*xual health services and most adult vaccines.

Arguably, they wouldn't be able to justify doing that if we didn't exist. We've basically replaced the city's public health clinic - our work would normally be done by unionized public health nurses. So like cool, where else is the public health clinic an anarchist collective?

But also - Berkeley needs to fund its fu***ng dept of public health and not expect a disorganized crew of volunteers to provide essential public health services on their own initiative. If they wanna drop the ball on treating syphilis, ethically we'll try to fill that gap.

So have any other mutual aid folks found themselves in this situation, where you slowly replace a government provided service that used to exist? Is this just our neoliberal hellscape continuing to divest from services like they would anyway? We'd love to hear others' analysis.

01/01/2022

Anarchy is for lovers 🌹

So much love to all our fellow anarchists, organizers, outreach workers, harm reductionists, and radicals out there ✨

So stoked for another year of mutual aid and collective liberation ❤️

Follow for more breathtaking artwork 🌈

12/23/2021

‼️ACTION ALERT‼️ happening today ✨✨✨

Repost from :

“‘s tried and failed proposal to expand policing strategies in the Tenderloin is dangerous. We need care NOT cops!

We know the increase in police presence in the TL will disproportionately impact Black & brown unhoused community members who, due to lack of dignified housing options, are forced to live out their private lives in public space.

The Sheriff is increasing the city’s jail capacity by reopening an old jail. Instead of putting people in cages, the Mayor should implement CART — Compassionate Alternative Response Team — which would replace police in responding to homelessness.

We all care about public safety and making sure all Tenderloin residents, including families are safe. Unfortunately this will not make them more safe, and likely will make black and brown families feel less safe.”

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Berkeley, CA

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https://www.berkeleyfreeclinic.org/street-medicine-team

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Our Story

The Street Medicine Team formed in 2019 from what was originally HIV Prevention Services (HPS). HPS formed in 1989 to offer anonymous HIV testing in response to HIV stigma and criminalization. Our services centered the rights to bodily autonomy and privacy that public health often denies to people living with HIV. Over the years, most anonymous test sites closed due to pressures from public health departments and funding sources, and we are now the only non-student organization in the Bay Area that provides anonymous HIV testing.

Over the years, HPS evolved to meet the needs of marginalized folks in the East Bay and began focusing on outreach, providing hepatitis C testing and routine vaccinations in addition to HIV testing. As we expanded our services, we realized we needed a more descriptive name, and became the Street Medicine Team.

We try to keep our services as accessible as possible. There are no eligibility requirements whatsoever and clients can provide as much or as little information about themselves as comfortable.

05/29/2025

02/19/2024

01/04/2024

07/21/2022

01/22/2022

01/17/2022

01/13/2022

01/07/2022

01/05/2022

01/05/2022

01/01/2022

12/23/2021

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