History
UMMA was started by a small group of UCLA students in 1991. Their goal: to set up a free clinic for the benefit of an entire community, based on the premise that healthcare is a right and not a privilege. The student founders approached and won the support of the City of Los Angeles; University of California, Los Angeles, and Charles R. Drew University.
They worked with government officials to raise $1.3 million in grants, brainstormed with architects to rebuild a dilapidated structure on Florence Ave. in South Los Angeles, and collected donated equipment.
In September 1996, UMMA Clinic's doors to the community were opened. The students have since themselves become doctors, researchers and parents.
Over a ten-year period, UMMA's infrastructure has grown considerably; today employing 18 full-time staff, supported by a legion of volunteers.
Since UMMA's birth, over ten Muslim founded charitable health clinics have been established throughout the United States.
Read more about this topic: UMMA Community Clinic
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)