If you drive through Dorchester or Hyde Park, you might spot a green, Celtic-themed vehicle with the bold white lettering “Curbside Care” across its side.
This isn’t just any truck — it’s a repurposed ambulance decked out in Celtics colors and fully equipped with maternal health tools. Designed to support new mothers in Boston’s high-risk neighborhoods, it brings critical care directly to their doorsteps, intending to significantly improve maternal health outcomes.
It’s also the reason why the Celtics won the NBA’s Social Impact and Inclusion Award last week.
It all started because the 18-time NBA champs – and their affiliated nonprofit, the Shamrock Foundation – identified a critical need in the Boston community: lots of new mothers weren’t attending critical postpartum doctor appointments.
“Forty percent of the moms at the Boston Medical Center were not returning for their appointments because they didn’t have transportation, and [due to] other barriers,” Kash Cannon, the Celtics’ Director of Community Engagement, told CelticsBlog. “And so we started brainstorming with them, and we thought it was a perfect opportunity to impact the landscape of maternal health, and specifically Black maternal health. That’s how the partnership really started.”
Everything moved quickly once a need was identified. A longtime Celtics season ticket holder who owned a car dealership helped the organization find an ambulance that could be repurposed to become a medical clinic on wheels.
“We bought that ambulance, we gutted it, and then we retrofitted it with a bunch of maternal equipment,” Cannon said. “And then we donated that to Boston Medical Center. That was the birth of the Curbside Care program.”
Curbside Care has benefitted more than 500 women in two years
Thanks to Curbside Care, BMC has been able to routinely visit high-need areas in Hyde Park, Mattapan, and Dorchester since 2023. They’ve provided women with comprehensive healthcare appointments at their doorsteps, committed to improving health outcomes for young mothers.
“It’s essentially a new model of care,” Cannon said. “So it’s newborn care, lactation support, and postpartum depression screening. They do blood pressure. They do counseling on preconception health, chronic disease management. They assist with food insecurity issues, because BMC has a food pantry. So, if a mom is being seen on the unit and she expresses that she’s having issues with food security, they provide that. They provide wraparound services and a holistic approach.”
The women are recruited from BMC’s prenatal clinic. Patients who choose to enroll in Curbside Care are seen by a Community Wellness Advocate and receive a full needs assessment. Then, in the first six weeks of their baby’s life, they are visited by the mobile health unit at least three times to ensure all of their needs are met.
All of it is part of the team’s commitment to addressing racial injustice and social inequities in the Greater Boston area, a commitment that was codified after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, when the team launched Boston Celtics United. That initiative emphasizes combating issues that have impacted the Black community as a result of the nation’s long-term history of systemic racism. Curbside Care has become one of its flagship programs.
In the U.S., Black women were three to four times more likely to die during childbirth than their white peers, per the CDC. That reality caught the attention of the Celtics.
“Everything that we do really starts with data,” Cannon said. “If there’s data that exists within our communities, and we’re like, this is horrific, and we can’t sit around with all of these resources in this type of platform and do nothing — that’s really what gets our attention and where we want to focus our efforts on. And so that’s essentially how we came upon Curbside Care.”
Derrick White has become a champion for Curbside Care
Derrick White has become especially involved in the program, attending all of the Celtics’ Curbside Care events in recent years. One year, he gifted all of the mothers high-quality strollers. This year, he gave all of the moms enrolled in Curbside Care brand-new, fancy car seats.
“He’s just an incredible person,” Cannon said. “He really just latched on to the program. All of our players get really excited about our work, but Curbside Care in particular really pulled at Derrick White’s heartstrings.”
In less than two years, the program has served more than 500 mothers, all of whom received lactation support and were screened for material needs and postpartum depression. In addition to working with the Boston Medical Center, the partnership has also evolved to include Point32 Health, a nonprofit health and well-being organization.
Since launching Curbside Care, the Celtics have met with BMC on a biweekly basis to get updates on how things are going and discuss other ways the organization can be supportive.
In the meantime, the Celtics leverage their brand — whether that’s the involvement of players like White, their mascots, or whatever else — to make programs particularly engaging.
“We come up with a program that addresses a need, and then we add what I like to call the Celtic sizzle — whether that’s players, it’s Lucky, anything that gets the people excited and actually moves them in the direction that’s going to potentially be life changing for them.”
