The mission of Women of Means, Inc. (WoM) is to improve the lives of women who are homeless or marginally housed through quality health care, education and advocacy.Homeless women and children face unique challenges when accessing health care including poor mental health, isolation, fear, alienation and cognitive issues. Add the daily physical complications of living without a home and accessing even the most basic health care becomes a struggle. The homeless spend a disproportionate amount of time finding and keeping shelter beds, attending to survival needs such as food, warmth and safety or parenting their children under adverse circumstances while at the same time working to get on housing lists. There are no disposable incomes to purchase over-the-counter medicines or medical supplies, and the geographical location of shelters and the rules about length of stay impact the ability to be settled enough to create any order out of this chaos. Complicating matters, placement in family shelters in Massachusetts is on a space available basis, which means that a family in the eastern part of the state may be placed in a shelter in the western part of the state. Families must take the offer or lose their place on the shelter lists. For lone women without children, there are no such lengthy shelter stays, but there are other challenges. Women who are alone are offered temporary shelter for no longer than a week to three weeks, after which time they are required to move on to another shelter for another short length of stay, repeating the circuit of shelters over and over. Whereas housed and financially stable individuals might not think twice about contacting their health care providers about an earache, a homeless woman has to consider whether she has insurance, a provider and if she can get transportation to her appointment. She must weigh if going to a clinic or emergency room means she would miss a meal or a bed, whether leaving a safe location she would risk being seen and her identity revealed to a batterer, whether she would be willing to wait for hours to be seen, whether she would be able to understand the doctor's advice and be able to follow the instructions within the confines and rules of the shelter. Finally, she has to consider whether she would have adequate money and the level of Medicaid insurance to pay her co-pay and pay for medicine. Women of Means was founded with the knowledge and understanding of these real life contexts of homelessness. It was designed to create an alternative health care delivery system that would engage the most vulnerable citizens living on the fringes of available resources and bring them closer to mainstream medical care.As a first intervention, WoM's medical team works to build a trusting relationship and then finds ways to connect patients to hospital or health center resources with primary care practices. A reliable and constant presence in the shelters, the medical team is well positioned to act as facilitators and communicators, providing patients with ongoing assistance, interpretation and emotional support. Based on data that shows the team makes over 2,000 communications efforts each year with outside clinicians, they are bridging a gap in service.