• We maintain that health care should be available at a level and quality sufficient to meet the basic needs of everyone regardless of race, sex, age, or income level.

• We view health as encompassing the total well-being of a person including physical, emotional, and environmental needs.

• We are strongly opposed to health care delivery as a profit-making industry.

• The existing health care institutions monopolize the means of production of health care (knowledge, equipment, hospitals, personnel), and use them for profit of private doctors, the drug and hospital supply industry, and professional and corporate interests; they pursue profit-making at the expense and detriment of the people they claim to serve.

• Community people (especially the medically under-served) must be encouraged to define their own needs and the services necessary to meet them.

• Health workers, professionals, institutions, and government must be responsive and accountable to the community.

• The Berkeley Community Health Project (Free Clinic) is a community based health care agency which was established by people who saw and experienced unmet needs in their own community.

• We work out of concern for community health and welfare.

• We maintain that health care should be provided in a supportive way by members of the community who identify with the clients and their needs.

• Primary care services must be accessible to people in the community where they live and work.

• Inherent in our services is our commitment to fight racism and sexism and to develop an awareness of class divisions in our society.

• Within our agency we strive to develop a collective, nonhierarchical process which encourages each of us to recognize and use our own power and take responsibility and accountability for our own actions and the actions of the clinic.

• For us, collectivity is a work process based on shared goals and perceptions—with power, responsibility, and accountability equally shared.

• We realize that in order to work collectively we must break out of many patterns into which we've been socialized and that this is a difficult, on-going process.

These attitudes mystify knowledge about health, create an artificial shortage of people who can legally give services, and promote health care as a commodity. 

• We oppose the present economic system and any other economic system that exploits people's abilities rather than encouraging their growth, that encourages alienation and competition rather than cooperation and community, that promotes and perpetuates racist and sexist roles in health care and society in general, and that discourages people from taking power over their lives and in their communities.

• These include housing, employment, transportation—in short the quality of the entire community's surroundings.

• We recognize the importance of the larger struggle—on the local, regional, national, and international levels—and affirm our commitment to supporting and participating in that struggle.