When Millsaps College alumnae Jamie Bardwell and Danielle Lampton cofounded Converge in 2018, they did not have a name for it, nor did they know exactly how it would operate; they just knew they wanted to improve Mississippi’s reproductive and sexual health-care landscape.
The Women’s Foundation of Mississippi fiscally sponsored the organization that year as the women visited clinics across the state and talked with people who described the lack of access to quality reproductive and sexual health care in Mississippi.
“We decided that it was a systems-level problem that required a lot of different types of solutions,” Bardwell told the Mississippi Free Press on July 23.
In 2019, she said, Converge got its official Internal Revenue Service nonprofit designation. By 2022, the Mississippi-based nonprofit started receiving the Title X Family Planning Grant award from the federal government. After the Biden administration stripped the Title X grant from the Tennessee Health Department over the State’s refusal to provide patients with information on abortion in 2023, Converge was able to apply to receive the grant to expand its work in Tennessee.
Bardwell said her nonprofit uses its $7 million in grant money each year to fund affiliated nonprofit clinics that provide reproductive and sexual health care in Mississippi and Tennessee. Converge has health-care providers that offer telehealth services to patients and give personalized care and easy access to providers. Community health partners across Mississippi and Tennessee attend local events and tell the public about the services Converge offers.
This Saturday, July 26, Converge and the Mississippi Reproductive Health Justice Coalition are hosting a pop-up reproductive health-care clinic at the Jackson Medical Mall as the first stop on the ReproHealth Tour.
The pop-up clinic will provide free and low-cost services to Mississippians, like physical exams, vital sign checks, sexually transmitted disease testing and counseling, contraceptive counseling and beginning prescriptions, pregnancy testing and preconception counseling, along with other educational resources. Converge will also offer a free three-month supply of the first over-the-counter birth control pill, the O-pill.
“We can provide the same kind of services any clinic would provide, but it’s kind of an ad-hoc kind of clinic day,” Bardwell said.
The clinic will not offer abortion services because abortion is essentially illegal in Mississippi since the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization U.S. Supreme Court decision allowed states to construct their own abortion laws.
The Jackson Medical Mall has many empty clinic spaces due to the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s decision to move a vast majority of its services, including its obstetrics and gynecology clinics, from the mall to North State Street in Jackson. The Jackson Hinds Comprehensive Health Center—which used to have oncology, surgery and specialty clinics at the medical mall—also moved out in May.
“Jackson was not going to be the first stop necessarily, but what made us do that at the medical mall was that we heard this summer so many clinics and providers were leaving the medical mall—UMMC in particular and Jackson-Hinds. We realized that there’s going to be a huge lack of services available that people once relied on,” Bardwell said.
Throughout the process, the Converge team realized that Jackson needs more permanent reproductive health-care clinics. Bardwell said her team thought the Jackson Medical Mall clinic space would be a perfect place to have Converge’s first brick-and-mortar clinic, which will open in September.
“When everyone else seems to be fleeing care, we feel like it’s our responsibility to lean towards that,” she said. “It feels like so much is in disarray right now in the world and with how people experience care. And so, we feel strongly that it’s our place to make sure people have access to quality care no matter where they are.”
Converge’s community pop-up reproductive health clinic will be open to the public at the Jackson Medical Mall on July 26 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. People who attend the event can either walk into the clinic to receive care without an appointment or schedule an appointment ahead of time.
Converge will also bring the ReproHealth Tour to Hattiesburg, Greenville, Natchez and Gulfport, Bardwell said, with the dates and times to be determined.
