A Beacon in the Desert: Community Care Empowers

Desert Star Institute for Family Planning is a beacon to the people who benefit from our care, programs, and advocacy. We are a safe space for our community. We are not only a trusted health care provider, we are a trusted voice for the people we serve whose care is highly politicized and stigmatized, bodies criminalized, and who have been medically traumatized.

I founded Desert Star Institute in April of 2017 after operating my privately owned clinic Desert Star Family Planning for 4 years. This is our 8th Anniversary (yay)! There were some needs I saw in the community that I would not be able to adequately address without a charitable offering. People could not afford their care, especially very expensive long-term birth control like IUDs and Implants. 

The nexplanon device goes into the upper arm and the device alone costs $1,300. We discount the visit for insertion.

Our community needed education so they could make informed decisions as true partners in their health and wellness. There were not many people that looked like them advocating for their access to essential reproductive and sexual health care at the policy advocacy level. 

That's me in the lower right corner at a lunch and learn at the capital.

Your generosity fuels our impact. There is so much more we want to offer the communities we serve. We want to provide more long-term birth control to uninsured people. We want to sustain our reproductive justice coalition spaces with adequate funding and resources to continue to amplify the voices of marginalized communities most impacted by the harmful policies that go forth in our state and in our country. We want to train more providers on whole person care, within the reproductive justice framework, cultivating excellent physicians who also advocate for reproductive health and justice in their communities.

I am running an early abortion procedure simulation with medical students at a conference.

You help keep essential services in the community with your giving and we are counting on you during our next phase of organizational growth. In 2023, you showed up for our nonprofit to acquire the Desert Star Family Planning clinic. We have operated as a nonprofit community based clinic for a year now. With your support we continue to build the infrastructure to meet the call that our community places upon us every day. 

The call that I have envisioned responding to for years now is community space. You have the opportunity to contribute to our community resource space as a part of our expansion this year. We can no longer constrain our work by the space we fit ourselves into. This year a space for community coalition meetings, board meetings, community classes, roundtable discussions, wellness activities, working space, and more will be a reality! I was so excited to draw out the plans for our new home, housing all that we do. 

• No more coalition meetings and board meetings in the clinic lobby. 
• No more turning down opportunities to host important community conversations due to lack of space. 
• No more looking for space to host the community because we will have our own! 
• No more squeezing staff, trainees, and volunteers into small spaces. 

We have been working towards this for years, and we are co-creating our future and the impact with can make with you. Help me reach my personal fundraising goal of $10,000 with $5,000 of it raised now during early giving.

Please give what you can and share my fundraising link. You never know who in your network is able to give. One share is worth a $100 gift. The fundraiser will get in front of another person who can give if you share it. 

With Deep Gratitude

Dr. DeShawn