How a free clinic with Yale ties is helping underserved patients get care in Oklahoma City

In 2014, Jackson Higginbottom was a pre-medical student in Oklahoma City and, to supplement his studies, he wanted to volunteer at a free clinic in the community. Higginbottom’s classmates recommended the same place: Manos Juntas.

Manos Juntas, which means “hands together” in Spanish, is a nonprofit clinic in Oklahoma City providing free primary and specialty care to uninsured and underserved patients.

“This was my first experience working directly with people who came from different backgrounds, spoke different languages, and had different life experiences,” said Higginbottom, MPH ’20, program manager of the Public Health Data Science and Data Equity initiative at the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) and assistant director of the Peter Salovey and Marta Moret Data Science Fellows Program. “Working in these free clinics, you hear your patients’ stories and challenges.”

Now, Higginbottom is running the clinic where his passion for public health started—and using his experience at Yale as both a student and staffer to directly help the community he grew up in.

Manos Juntas first opened its doors in 1995. The nonprofit clinic was founded by Dr. Boyd Shook to help provide care to underserved members of the Oklahoma City community, including immigrants.

“Our clinic sees anyone, regardless of insurance status, financial status, or zip code,” Higginbottom said. “Those were beliefs of Dr. Shook, and I hold these same beliefs. The health of any one individual impacts the health of the community, and there are a lot of reasons why people don’t get health care. It may be because they don't have insurance or can’t afford it, but it could also be because of stigma.”

Each year, Manos Juntas helps more than 2,000 Oklahomans get medical care they wouldn’t be able to access otherwise. The clinic is open to patients every Saturday for primary care appointments, prescriptions, laboratory services, seasonal vaccinations, and diabetes management. There’s usually a line out the door, Higginbottom said.

“It’s important to me to make sure that the quality of care is no different than if you went to Yale New Haven Health or Yale Health,” Higginbottom said. “We need to be treating our patients with the same dignity and respect that we would all expect anywhere else.”

As its name implies, Manos Juntas brings many “hands together” to deliver that care. The clinic is run by volunteers, including its medical director and 15 volunteer providers. Each year, roughly 300 undergraduate students volunteer at the clinic. Over the clinic’s 30-year history, more than 4,400 people have volunteered, many of whom have gone on to become doctors, public health professionals, and other health practitioners.

Growing up in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, Higginbottom had long aspired to work in medicine. When he began volunteering at Manos Juntas in 2014, he worked in the medical laboratory as a phlebotomist, collecting blood samples from patients and preparing those samples for testing. But he soon realized he was drawn to public health and its potential to impact the health of a population, not just the individual.

Higginbottom applied to YSPH in 2017. Shook wrote his letter of recommendation.

In 2022, on Christmas Day, Higginbottom received a phone call. The clinic manager of Manos Juntas had sad and unexpected news: Shook had died.

At the time, Higginbottom was vice president of the clinic; he had been appointed to the position just six months prior. He was also 1,500 miles away in Connecticut, where he was working at YSPH— but he jumped in to handle many of Shook’s duties and responsibilities.

The big question, said Higginbottom, was: “How do we stay open?”

He decided to make a trip back to Oklahoma City to assess the clinic in person. The most pressing concern, he said, was its financial situation. The clinic often relied on financial contributions from Shook. Plus, Higginbottom didn’t have access to important financial documents, including the clinic’s bank accounts, articles of incorporation, and even its tax-exempt letter. To make matters worse, the COVID-19 pandemic was ongoing, and many nonprofits were relying heavily on grants to stay afloat.

Higginbottom had to make some tough decisions. Those included temporarily closing the clinic as he searched for a new medical director.

Luckily, his experience at YSPH equipped him with two skills that proved critical during this time: evaluation and communications.

“Those are two things that you really need when you're trying to court funders or donors,” he said. “We need to evaluate our programs to show the impact that we are having. Otherwise, why would someone donate to us?”

Under Higginbottom’s leadership, Manos Juntas raised $27,500 that January to keep it afloat for the next few months. The clinic was able to reopen for prescription refills and then provider visits. Higginbottom has continued to lead fundraising efforts for the clinic, including securing grants that provide long-term support for the clinic.

As the board president and interim director of Manos Juntas, Higginbottom has overseen a full organizational transition at the clinic, all while working remotely from New Haven. At his day job, Higginbottom serves as the program manager for the Public Health Data Science and Data Equity Initiative and assistant director of the Yale Data Science Fellows Program, both led by YSPH Senior Associate Dean Bhramar Mukherjee, PhD. In these roles, he helps lead efforts to train the next generation of data scientists to tackle public health challenges with equity-centered approaches.

“Jackson’s work in his home state of Oklahoma exemplifies YSPH’s vision of ‘linking science and society,’” said YSPH Dean Megan Ranney. “He helps his community be healthier by melding good science with deep humanism. We are fortunate for his partnership with our Yale community as well as back home in Oklahoma.”

While most patients come to Manos Juntas for primary care, in the past three years Higginbottom has expanded the clinic’s services to include specialty care in cardiology, women’s health, psychiatry, and endocrinology. He has also been able to implement an Electronic Medical Record system—digitizing the paper charts that health care providers traditionally use to document patient care—at the clinic for the first time, an initiative supported in part by a Yale intern.

“I was surprised to hear that there were still clinics relying on mostly pen and paper in 2024,” said Michelle Zheng ’25, who, as a clinical transformation intern at Manos Juntas during the summer of 2024, helped guide the EMR implementation. “It revealed to me disparities in the health care industry that I hadn’t been able to see before.”

Higginbottom also developed a new volunteer structure. The tiered system now includes volunteer supervisors, a core team Higginbottom and the board of directors can delegate to; volunteer leads, who have experience working at the clinic and know the ropes; and entry-level volunteers, who require training and supervision.

Higginbottom emphasized that he couldn’t have done this work alone, crediting his dedicated team of volunteer supervisors, the clinic’s medical director Aneesh Pakala, and community partners—including the Oklahoma City Community Foundation, Direct Relief, Americares, among many others—for making the clinic’s progress possible.

Over the years, Higginbottom also relied on advice from Rachel Littman ’91, Patrice Yang ’97, Irving Ye ’07, and other members of the Yale Alumni Nonprofit Association, a global community of  Yale alumni, students, and friends committed to generating positive social impact.

“I’m deeply grateful to the Yale community,” Higginbottom said. “From colleagues who’ve shared their expertise to alumni who’ve offered encouragement and resources, their support has helped our clinic continue serving thousands of patients. I’d welcome continued advice and partnership from the Yale alumni community as we strengthen our work in Oklahoma.”

For Higginbottom, this work isn’t just the culmination of years of experience working in public health. It’s also deeply personal.

Growing up, he and his family struggled financially. They relied on Oklahoma's Medicaid program, called SoonerCare, a health-coverage program jointly funded by the federal and state government. Since he started working at the clinic, his grandparents and mother have relied on Manos Juntas for care, as have thousands of fellow Oklahomans.

“I’m a product of Oklahoma,” Higginbottom said. “Being able to go back and continue trying to improve the health of Oklahoma while working at Yale has been great. It’s been the best of both worlds.”