With support from Fahe’s Community Lending via the Uplift America Fund and New Markets Tax Credit Program, Dayspring Health transformed an abandoned building that once housed Walmart into a state-of-the-art healthcare facility, and established a comprehensive source for healthcare in Whitley County, Kentucky. A partnership leveraging federal resources, bank financing, and private grant funds to provide capital to persistently low-wealth areas, Uplift America awarded a low-interest USDA loan of $11,500,000 to Dayspring Health to expand access to medical care in this underserved area, while the NMTC Program provided tax credits as an incentive for private investment in this low-income community.
Whitley County is one of 39 Kentucky counties identified by the United States Census Bureau as a persistent poverty county, experiencing a poverty rate of over 20% for the last three decades. Whitley County is also classified as a Health Professional Shortage Area and a Medically Underserved Area, and in the past this lack of both facilities and providers necessitated that area residents travel more than 75 miles to access quality healthcare.
The 57,000-square-foot Dayspring Regional Health Center—part of a network that also includes medical offices in Clairfield and Jellico, Tennessee—opened to the public in June 2024, adding 50 permanent, high-quality jobs to the local economy in addition to expanding access to essential medical care. The center is already seeing as many as 175 patients each day.
Dayspring Health CEO Larry Rector says of the network, “The number of new patients we are seeing is somewhere near 300 to 400 per quarter, which is significant.”
Rector continued, “For us to say we are serving 12,000 unique individual patients on an annual basis is a good step for us in the first three years. But my expectations for the long term are somewhere in the area of 14,000 to 16,000 patients.”
In addition to general family and pediatric medicine, the new center provides obstetrics and women’s healthcare, telehealth, behavioral health services, radiology and imaging, lab testing, and dental care in a central location. Dayspring Health plans to bring a pharmacy, physical therapy, and chiropractic care to the center in the future. As a community health center, Dayspring Health also strives to provide services that are affordable.
Says Rector, “We can price it in such a way that it could be affordable for all. Patients know that they can come to Dayspring if finances are a barrier for as little as ten dollars a visit.”
Of the impact on the community, Rector states, “What I hear from community leaders is a rejuvenated and enthusiastic perspective on the future. When you’ve got a healthcare facility like this in your community, you can attract professionals. When families are considering relocating to a town the first thing they want to find is a pediatric practice they can trust.
“It’s an asset to this town and we can continue to build on it, bring jobs here and, essentially, everybody wins.”
With Fahe’s Community Lending assistance, the facility, which is already inspiring plans for similar facilities in other rural and underserved communities, has provided hope for the future.
“It was a huge leap of faith for Fahe to say they would do this with us, beside us, and in a way that was affordable,” said Rector.
He concluded, “We knew that change was possible in our community when our board said yes. When presented with the funding sources and project plans, they approved it before we even had ink on paper because they believed. They knew we could succeed.”
