The Imani Clinic at Oak Park is the brainchild of medical students of the Student National Medical Association at UC Davis School of Medicine. This is an organization of medical students dedicated to improving outcomes -- medical, academic and social -- among members of the African American community. Students began a ten-year process of planning, research and negotiation because they were concerned about the staggering and persistent morbidity and mortality rates from hypertension, heart disease, cancer, and inadequate prenatal care among African Americans.

The clinic opened on October 22, 1994 in the heart of the Oak Park neighborhood in Sacramento. This site was selected because of the ethnic diversity of the population it serves. Most recent census data indicates that 57 percent of the population is non-white; additionally 80 percent of this community can be classified by income as working poor or unemployed.

This demographic picture fits into the goals of those who worked so hard to make the clinic a reality. These goals include to provide preventive and episodic primary health care to an underserved community without regard to address (or lack of one), national/ethnic origin, immigration status, language, religion or ability to pay; to expose medical students early in their training to the complexities of providing community-based care to a diverse population where social, economic and medical issues are intimately intertwined; to provide undergraduate students interested in careers as health professions with the opportunity to experience first-hand health care delivery in a community-based setting; and to foster early and lasting relationships between students, health-care professionals and the community.