WoM’s theory of change has four elements: - Consistent presence when and where vulnerable women and children congregate. - Relationship medicine through personal relationship development and consistent case management. WoM clinicians are adept at establishing trusting relationships with even the most hard-to-engage patients. - Clinical education for community service: WoM mentors more than 100 medical and nursing students and medical residents per year through clinical rotations in our shelter-based free clinics. - Advocacy and collaboration: WoM leadership works closely with shelters, health care providers and other relevant partners to improve services and quality of life for our community's most marginalized and vulnerable members.

In 1999, Roseanna H. Means, MD founded Women of Means, Inc. with the mission "to improve the lives of women who are homeless or marginally housed through quality health care, education and advocacy." Through her work over eight years in a program that operated in homeless clinics around Boston, Dr. Means observed that disproportionately fewer women used the homeless clinics than were represented in the homeless census. Women reported that they didn’t like going to the same clinic as homeless men, because it was these same men who attacked them on the streets. In addition, for the majority of women who had become homeless solely due to economic decline, the prospect of using only services designed for homeless, rather than for “housed” persons, felt demeaning and shameful. WoM is now the largest volunteer organization of its kind in Massachusetts, with over $500,000 of pro-bono clinical services provided by a unified team of over 30 clinicians, medical and nursing students and residents. Each year, WoM provides nearly 10,000 clinical visits to 2,500 homeless and precariously housed women and children.

Support from the One Percent Foundation will greatly assist WoM to increase the nursing presence in its shelter-based free care clinics. WoM’s paid nursing staff provides the vital ‘behind the scenes work’ that allows the doctors to go into a shelter and provide their clinical work unencumbered by administrative or other concerns. Areas of nursing support typically include providing basic outreach and care onsite at the busiest shelters, offering patient education, following up with patients when doctors are not onsite, assessing and directing patients to the physicians, assisting patients in applying for the Massachusetts Medicaid program, and even helping patients find transportation. Strengthening the WoM nursing presence means both expanding outreach and advocacy services as well as providing vital direct health care services for the women and children we serve, thereby strengthening critical components of the WoM mission.

In its 2009 Form 990, Women of Means reported $506,140 in revenues and $459,568 in expenditures, leaving $46,572 as a surplus. This was due to a slight increase in anticipated fundraising dollars and savings from partial-year position vacancies occurring in 2009. Women of Means spent $352,435 on salaries, benefits, and payroll taxes, with $116,308 going to the President and Chief Medical Officer.

Dr. Rosanna Means, the founder of Women of Means,  started the organization with a vision of creating an organization that provided free access to healthcare for women in homlessness shelters in the Greater Boston area. Out of the six primary homelessness shelters in Boston, WoM is the only primary healthcare presence for four of them. With a team of both volunteer doctors and part-time nursing staff members, the WoM team dedicates their time and energy to educate, advocate and provide quality healthcare to women who recieve shelter services. The organization does not recieve any funding from government sources and it's primary revenue is supplied by donations from individuals and corporate businessess. As a result, Women of Means is a non-traditional health organization who has chosen to exclude red-tape from individuals recieving access to care. With no physical health center, the staff visits shelters daily and does not exclude services to anyone. Women of Means is now operating in it's tenth year and has scaled to provide nearly 10,000 clinical visits to 2,500 homeless and precariously housed women and children each year. 

As a (part-time) resident of Boston, I nominated Women of Means because it reaches out to a highly underserved community: homeless women. It sends its teams of passionate physicians and nurses to homeless shelters to treat women and their children where they are (as homeless women are often under-represented at formal clinics for homeless persons). They work across the Boston area, providing references for further care and offering patient education, transforming the lives of thousands of women who are often overlooked by the formal healthcare system. - Endorsement by Dulcie Madden