Our Mission Statement
Kerry's Kids is a mobile pediatric health clinic that provides free
health care services to underserved children in their communities and facilitates connecting each child to a permanent medical and dental home.
Our Health
Care Providers
We are grateful to all of the volunteer doctors, dentists, nurse practitioners and nurses that work with us to make our clinical services possible.
Board of Directors
Edward Chu, M.D.
Dan Dean
Kathy Dean
Diane Halberg, M.D.
Gena Lewis, M.D.
Robert Savio, M.D.
How we started
In 1998, Kerry’s Kids’ volunteers worked with the Oakland Head Start Program, to identify various sites in the community that were in need of the services of a mobile health clinic. The sites identified included homeless shelters, residential drug rehabilitation facilities for mothers and children, and a refuge for battered women.
More than twenty years later, Kerry’s Kids remains committed to our mission to provide health and dental care free of charge to those children most in need. Our current services are embedded in homeless shelters, transitional housing sites, domestic violence programs, and community centers. As from the very beginning, our services continue to be provided by volunteer pediatricians, dentists, nurse practitioners, and nurses.
About Kerry Spooner-Dean
Kerry's Kids was established to carry on the dream of Dr. Kerry Spooner-Dean after her life ended unexpectedly in May 1998 before she was able to complete her work. Kerry's dream was to help organize a mobile health clinic to serve indigent children and their families in the San Francisco Bay Area. She realized that many children never made it to clinics and hospitals due to lack of health insurance, a parent’s fear of judgment, language barriers, and transportation difficulties.
Dr. Kerry Spooner-Dean working with children in a mobile home health clinic.
Kerry understood that in order to provide adequate health care, health screening, immunizations and health education to these children, it was essential to bring medical services directly to the children and their families in the communities where they lived. It was this realization that drove Kerry to follow her dream of organizing a pediatric mobile health clinic.
Both during and after her pediatric residency at Children's Hospital Oakland, Dr. Kerry Spooner-Dean committed herself to volunteer efforts to help children and families who were homeless or had other difficulties accessing health care services in the community. Kerry met with health workers and officials in city and county health services agencies, offered her services as a physician, and volunteered to help coordinate the efforts of other health care providers.
Following her death, Dr. Spooner-Dean’s colleagues created Kerry’s Kids to continue her life’s work. Kerry’s Kids continues to be committed to improving health care access to underserved children in their neighborhoods.
