History of CBB

Care Beyond the Boulevard, Inc. was conceived by Jaynell (KK) Assmann while volunteering at a food ministry. As a registered nurse working to become a nurse practitioner, she was constantly asked about medical concerns and helping those coming to the ministry for food. Her goal was to open a clinic to provide free, quality medical care to the people coming to the ministry. 

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Care Beyond the Boulevard (CBB) began as an entirely volunteer-based mobile medical clinic operating from the back of a pickup truck. The goal was simple – deliver high-quality healthcare to the homeless and other patients who lacked access to these services. With our small team of volunteers and a homemade pharmaceutical cabinet, we drove the streets of Kansas City, MO seeking to make an impact.

 

CBB registered over 900 patient encounters, treating everything from chronic illnesses such as diabetes, COPD, and hypertension to acute conditions such as abscesses, burns, seizures, STDs, and frostbite. CBB received a donated school bus and the funds required for renovating it into a mobile medical clinic.

 

By spring of 2018, the bus had been converted into a fully functional mobile clinic and was active on the streets! This greatly improved CBB's ability to care for these patients along with our visibility, which has in turn helped us grow to serve even more patients in need. CBB was projected to exceed 1500 patient encounters in 2018.

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CBB continued to grow, adding stationary clinics on Monday and Thursday evenings to the already busy routes served by the Big Green Bus for mobile clinics Tuesday and Wednesday nights. We hired a Street Outreach Coordinator who has helped house many patients, worked to gather different identification records, and provided case management services. By the end of 2020, CBB had seen 1,405 patients and had 4,165 separate encounters. 

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In 2021, we experienced exponential growth. We expanded our staff to 5 full time employees. By March, we were running four stationary clinics and three mobile clinics each week. We also received our green van which helped us to reach more patients throughout the city. In mid 2021, and in partnership with the Jackson County Health Department and Moffett Drug in Norton, KS, we began vaccinating our patients against COVID-19 as well as continuing to offer other seasonal and recommended vaccinations. Towards the end of the year, we brought on a part-time Medicaid Navigator to help many of our patients who were now eligible for Medicaid in Missouri apply for and begin receiving those benefits. In total we saw 2,686 patients and had 7,259 total patient encounters visits in the calendar year.

 

2022 quickly became a very big year for CBB. By the end of August, we saw 1971 patients and had 5909 separate encounters, with predictions to surpass our numbers from the previous year. We brought on a vaccine coordinator to help manage the robust vaccine initiative we have been providing. Since April 2021, we have administered over 2,100 Covid vaccines. We also introduced our respite care program, helping transition patients from the hospital for their recovery. In late 2022, our CEO, KK, and one of our volunteers, Jonah, went to the International Street Medicine Symposium to present results from our patient satisfaction survey, hoping to set a standard for other programs to evaluate the care they are providing to their patients.