Reporter Volume 26, No.5 October 6, 1994

By MARK WALLACE
Reporter Contributor
Juanita Hunter's involvement with the Nursing Center for the Homeless
is just another example of a UB professor who is working to better the
lives of people in Western New York.
	The Nursing Center for the Homeless, a project sponsored by
the UB School of Nursing, has been providing health services to
homeless persons at shelters in Buffalo since 1988.
	Hunter, a clinical associate professor at UB, became involved
with the Nursing Center in 1987 when a grant to establish the center
was submitted to the Division of Nursing of Federal Health and Human
Services, which funded the center from 1988-1993. When the grant was
received, Hunter became coordinator of the center, a position she
holds to this day.
	"The Nursing Center for the Homeless exemplifies the
importance of community and university partnerships around a current
health-care problem," says Hunter.
	Hunter has been instrumental in the many positive results of
the Nursing Center. She helped introduce the idea of a national
conference on the homeless in the first two years of the center, and
worked with the director of continuing education at UB to develop a
national conference for nurses and other providers for the homeless.
	The importance to Western New York of the Nursing Center,
Hunter says, is that "the center has opened up an avenue from UB to
people who feel that they share the health care burden
disproportionately - health-care professionals, social workers, and
administrators of agencies."
	The advantage to UB of the Nursing Center is that faculty
become actively involved in the health care of the community, which
creates many research and other opportunities for them in that
community, Hunter says. Also, student nurses do volunteer work for the
center, which puts them on the cutting edge of health care and
provides them with research opportunities as well, she says.
	In her own career, the Nursing Center has been the culmination
of combining her community health background with her concern for
disadvantaged populations, Hunter says.
	"The Nursing Center for the Homeless is a perfect example of
how the university can share its health-care knowledge, and how health
care can be improved by providing that knowledge to the community,"
Hunter says.