One Healthcare Home for Every Stage of Life

Legacy Community Health cares for more than 200,000 people across Houston and Beaumont every year. That number might include a second-grader who is getting her ears checked in a clinic built inside her own school. A man whose pharmacist is calling to make sure his blood pressure medication made it to the front door. And a young woman with a positive pregnancy test sitting with a navigator who books her prenatal visit for that same afternoon.

For 60 years, Community Health Centers have brought care to the people the system leaves out. More than 1,500 now serve over 52 million Americans, roughly one in seven. This year’s National Health Center Week theme — Building Innovative Care Where It Matters Most — describes what that work looks like on the ground, and Legacy Community Health lives it across more than 60 locations on the Texas Gulf Coast, 39 of them inside public schools.

Legacy calls this Health Beyond Care. High-quality medical care comes first, but a person’s health is shaped by much more than what happens in the exam room, so Legacy’s outreach doesn’t stop there. That has been the idea since our beginning.

It Started With One Clinic in Montrose

Legacy has been doing a version of this work since 1978 when The Montrose Clinic started screening, testing, and treating patients for sexually transmitted diseases at a time when very few places would. When the AIDS crisis hit in the 1980s, the clinic became the first community-based organization in Texas, and the second in the entire country, to offer confidential HIV testing.

Building innovative care where it matters most has been Legacy’s job description for close to 50 years.

The organization that grew out of that clinic now spans more than 60 locations and a dozen service lines — including pediatrics, adult and senior primary care, women’s health and OB-GYN, behavioral health, dental, vision, pharmacy, HIV care, and school-based clinics — but the instinct is the same one. Find the people the system is missing and go to them.

Still Building Where the Gaps Are

Two new clinics opened this year, both funded by a $50+ million transformational gift from Houston Methodist. Each one brings a full range of services into a community that truly needs them.

Legacy Pasadena Southmore opened in April 2026 at 1951 Southmore Avenue. The two-story building holds over 37,000 square feet of adult and pediatric primary care, OB-GYN, behavioral health, X-ray imaging, and wraparound support, with dental and pharmacy services to be added in August 2026. The location is deliberate. Nearly one in three Pasadena residents is uninsured, and the child uninsured rate there runs more than double the national average.

Legacy Pasadena Southmore is also the new home of the Houston Methodist Family Medicine Residency Program, which brings physicians in training onsite and teaches them what this kind of care looks like from the inside.

Legacy Acres Homes opened in July 2026 at 3011 W. Gulf Bank Road with 26,200 square feet of adult medicine, pediatrics, OB-GYN, behavioral health, and dental, plus a pharmacy opening in 2027. It also brings infusion services, which puts oncology care inside a neighborhood that has gone without it. The need runs deep here. More than a third of adults in Acres Homes have no health insurance.

Legacy is the largest Federally Qualified Health Center in Texas. The work still goes where the gaps are.

Pregnancy Care That Starts on Day One

At many Legacy clinics, you can walk in during business hours and take a free, confidential pregnancy test performed by a trained clinical professional. No appointment or insurance is required, and the tests we use are more than 99 percent accurate with results in as little as three minutes.

What happens after the result is what sets Legacy apart. A Perinatal Navigator reviews your result with you, and if you are pregnant, that same navigator follows you through the rest of your pregnancy. You get one person to call instead of a contact center.

That continuity is the whole point. “At the beginning of my pregnancy, I was overwhelmed and didn’t know who to turn to,” one patient told Alejandra Zuniga, Legacy’s Director of Perinatal Navigation. “By the end, I felt like I had someone in my corner every step of the way.” That kind of trust, Zuniga says, is what consistent support is built to create.

Patients can connect to prenatal care, Becoming a Mom education classes in English and Spanish, lactation support, birth planning, and postpartum screening. Families who finish the class series have a graduation baby shower. And through our OB2Pedi pathway, a Perinatal Care Coordinator helps your newborn transition straight into pediatric care at Legacy.

You can find participating walk-in testing locations on our OB-GYN and maternity page.

Support That Follows the Baby Home

The first three years are when the brain grows fastest, so they are also when support pays off the most.

At every well-child visit, Legacy pediatricians run developmental screenings using proven tools, like the Ages and Stages Questionnaire. We watch how children play, move, and respond. But the most useful information usually comes from the person who sees the child every day.

If something needs a closer look, we help families connect to Early Childhood Intervention and walk them through the referral.

Legacy also champions literacy. Through Little Readers, children from six months to 12 years leave well-child visits with a free book and a prescription to read. Nearly 300,000 books have gone home with families since 2015. Clinicians are trained through Reach Out and Read to coach parents on reading together, and many waiting rooms have book-filled corners built right in.

Health Care Inside the School Building

Legacy runs 39 clinics on public school campuses across KIPP, YES Prep Public Schools, and Galena Park ISD. Students at those schools and their siblings can enroll and be seen without leaving campus.

In the past year, our school-based team served 13,854 students and completed 72,911 appointments. Services include the following:

• Well-child checkups, vaccines, and sports physicals
• Care for asthma, ear infections, sore throats, and minor injuries
• Behavioral health support for anxiety, depression, grief, trauma, and family conflict, plus psychiatry
• Dental cleanings, exams, sealants, and fillings from six months to 18 years

All of it happens during school hours, which means less missed class time and fewer parents choosing between a paycheck and a pediatric visit. Insurance status never changes whether a student is seen. You can learn more about school-based care here.

Behavioral Health at Every Age

Good health isn’t only physical. Roughly 20 percent of Texas children and adolescents, one in five, report a mental, emotional, behavioral, or developmental problem.

Legacy has offered mental health care since the 1990s. Today that team includes 147 clinicians, made up of psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, and behavioral health consultants. In FY25, they served over 29,000 patients across nearly 229,000 appointments.

Care spans pediatric, adolescent, and adult patients, and covers conditions including depression, anxiety, autism spectrum disorders, and learning disabilities. Patients have access to assessment, therapy, medication management, and psychological testing.

Two things make this work differently at a community health center. Behavioral health sits inside the same system as your primary care, your OB-GYN, and your pediatrician, so your providers can actually talk to each other. And because so many of our patients are managing instability outside the clinic, we treat the Social Drivers of Health as clinical information rather than background.

Food insecurity, unstable housing, and no reliable transportation all feed poor mental health and worse outcomes at work and school. Treating anxiety without touching any of that only gets you so far.

HIV and STI Care Without the Barriers

Testing should be easy to reach, private, and free of judgment. That has always been Legacy’s position.

The need here is real and growing. Federal data reported 5,075 newly diagnosed HIV cases in Texas in 2023, and Harris County Public Health has reported that the Houston area is seeing the fastest growth in new HIV and STI cases in the state.

We offer free, confidential HIV testing at clinics across our service area, along with full STI panels, PrEP for prevention, treatment after exposure, injectable prevention and treatment options, and in-home testing kits. Services are also available through mobile outreach with community partners.

For people living with HIV, care doesn’t stop at a diagnosis. Our team serves more than 7,000 people a year with ongoing management designed to keep them healthy and thriving.

Spanish-speaking staff and Eligibility Specialists are part of that team. Language, cost, and judgment are three of the biggest reasons people skip testing, so we work to remove all three. See our HIV and STI services.

Fresh Food on Prescription

Harris County’s food insecurity rate sits around 15.4 percent, and diet-related conditions like type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease are among the most common and most preventable illnesses our patients face. At Legacy, food is part of the treatment plan.

FoodRx, built with the Houston Food Bank, lets eligible patients receive up to 30 pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables plus four healthy grocery items, twice a month, at no cost. Your care team screens you for food insecurity during a visit, and if you qualify, your provider refers you to our Health Connect team for enrollment.

A positive screen usually points to more than an empty pantry. “When someone screens positive for food insecurity, it is often a sign of broader challenges,” said William Lyons, Legacy’s Social Services Director. This could be trouble making rent, a lost job, or no way to reach a grocery store or a doctor. That’s why the screen matters. It is often the first thread that leads the care team to everything else a person is quietly managing, and to the benefits and resources that can help.

The program runs at Legacy Fifth Ward, Santa Clara, Southwest, Northline, Northside Irvington, and Gulfton Dashwood. It also runs when it’s needed most. After Hurricane Beryl, distributions at Santa Clara served 175+ households with fresh food, hygiene kits, and supplies, and nobody was turned away for not being enrolled yet.

A Pharmacy Built Around Getting Medication Home

A prescription only works if a patient can actually get it and take it correctly, so Legacy’s full-service pharmacies offer free prescription delivery, medication syncing, immunizations, and one-on-one counseling. Patients managing chronic conditions can get medication therapy management, health coaching, and smoking cessation support.

The most common reason someone stops taking a medication is cost. “We make sure the patient has seen eligibility so they get the best possible price on our sliding scale,” said Neha Agrawal, Director of Clinical Pharmacy Services. Even patients with insurance can qualify, and copays can be adjusted to match. “Our priority is that each patient gets the medication and care they deserve.”

Filling your prescriptions at Legacy helps fund the programs above, including HIV prevention, maternal care, and expanded clinic hours. Learn more or request delivery.

Cost Should Not Be the Reason You Wait

No one is turned away at Legacy, regardless of insurance status or ability to pay.

Our bilingual Health Navigators and Eligibility Specialists are in every clinic. They help patients enroll in Medicaid, CHIP, and ACA plans, handle renewals, set up MyChart, and apply our Sliding Fee Scale for anyone who doesn’t qualify for coverage.

For many patients, cost isn’t the only barrier. Our Health Connect team also helps patients navigate housing support, transportation assistance, employment resources, and more.

Start with our eligibility page or just ask at the front desk.

The Through Line

A pregnancy test, a book at a well-child visit, a therapy session between third and fourth period, a bag of produce, a delivered prescription. Individually they look like small things. Together they are a single system that follows a person from before birth through adulthood, in one healthcare home instead of a dozen disconnected ones.

That’s what Health Beyond Care means, and it’s already how Legacy operates.

National Health Center Week runs August 2 through 8, 2026. Ready to get connected? Call (832) 548-5000 or visit legacycommunityhealth.org to find a clinic near you.

Sources: National Association of Community Health Centers, Houston Food Bank, Houston Methodist, HIV.gov, Every Texan, Legacy Community Health