Negotiating Care

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores the creation of the Over 60 Health Clinic in Berkeley, California, during the mid-1970s. Developed by a local network of the activist group Gray Panthers, the clinic offered screening and preventive care to elderly clients and was intended to serve as a catalyst for broader health reform. Drawing on the proposals, contracts, and reports that structured the clinic’s early operations, the article traces the clinic’s efforts to imagine new modes of care, even within the constraints of collaboration with bureaucratic public agencies. In so doing, the East Bay Gray Panthers articulated a distinct understanding of “healthy aging” as relational and contingent on the maintenance of existing intergenerational communities.