Codman², a partnership between Codman Square Health Center (CSHC) and Codman Academy Charter Public School (CACPS), is the first co-located health and education partnership in the country. The rationale behind Codman² is simple yet powerful: healthier people learn better, and people with greater access to education are healthier.

The overall vision of the Codman Squared Partnership is to work with all its partners to mitigate the effects of poverty and create rich and innovative “communities of health” in which individuals and families benefit physically, economically, socially, intellectually, and behaviorally. The goals of the Codman Squared Partnership are to:

i. Improve health outcomes and increase educational attainment of Codman students to empower this next generation with the ability to live healthy, productive lives.

ii. Ensure increased access to preventive and direct health care for all Codman students and their families.

iii. Provide opportunities to students to learn about health careers and engage in academic and internship experiences that prepare them to pursue careers in health-related fields.

iv. Build an environment where education and health are integrated to create a climate of intellectual, spiritual, and physical wellbeing for Codman students, staff and patients.

v. Better integrate the Health Center and the School so as to better establish a definitive center of health and well-being for the Codman Square and the greater Dorchester community.

Hunger, chronic disease, trauma, and other environmental stressors adversely impact school performance. Likewise, the more schooling a person has the better their health. Poor education and poor health compound each other in a vicious cycle.

To help break the cycle, Codman² envisions a dynamic, collaborative eco-system of education and health care that helps reverse the effects of poverty, transforms lives within its community, and inspires a new model for social change.

 In support of this vision, Codman² seeks to develop a community that is well physically, economically, socially, intellectually, and behaviorally, by creating a holistic and cohesive network of quality health and education services and programs. This mission is enacted at Codman through the attainment of three key goals:

1)     Creating a broader and deeper health experience for students, their families, patients, and the community through comprehensive wellness and education activities and services;

 2)     Improving educational outcomes and enhancing opportunities for learning, career exploration, and professional skill building, including cultivating opportunities for the next generation of health care professionals of color.

 3)     Developing a sustainable model for more integrated health and education delivery that can be replicated nationally and internationally.

Codman² serves two communities. CSHC is able to reach more patients, more consistently through the continuous access CACPS provides, while CACPS can leverage the health expertise of CSHC to complement its academic programming. As such, partnership programming has been developed to address the needs of each of these organizations’ unique stakeholder groups within the context of the larger partnership and its goals. Over the years, the programs and services that Codman² has used to achieve its goals have evolved; however, they have remained anchored to the model’s core components: health and wellness, improved educational outcomes, and career and professional skill building.

Recognizing the impact Codman²  has had in its community, the partnership’s leaders believe the model has the potential to transform other communities as well.

In 2001, Codman Academy opened its doors on the site of Codman Square Health Center, becoming the first co-located health and education partnership in the country.

Over the course of 14 years, Codman Academy and Codman Square Health Center have learned much about what it takes to make such a partnership work. There have been innumerable successes, but also some challenges.

We want others to learn from our experience. For that reason, we drafted a Blueprint for Health and Education Partnerships to guide other organizations seeking to explore this unique model.

We offer in the documents section both the full Blueprint and its Executive Summary as a separate PDF.