Jubril Oyeyemi, MD, remembers the moment he knew he was going to be a doctor. He was a teenager in Nigeria, and he’d just been told his bubbly, loveable, 4-year-old neighbor Esther was dead. She’d had a typical childhood virus, but overnight her fever spiked too high and brought on a febrile seizure. It was entirely preventable, Oyeyemi now says.
“They didn’t have transportation, and the hospital was an hour away,” he says. “They just needed someone to say, ‘Let’s just bring her fever down so she doesn’t have a seizure.’ It was really just about having access to care. That would really shock my system as a teenager, and the conviction to become a doctor was born out of that experience.”
Oyeyemi came to the United States for college and medical school in Pennsylvania, and he soon joined Virtua Health as a hospital physician.
“Health is a basic right. It’s a basic need. To be able to be there for folks – it’s really a remarkable thing.”
Nigeria and New Jersey are more than 5,000 miles apart, but Oyeyemi saw the same pattern emerging among his patients. “I would get 5 to 10 cases a week that were really just a matter of lack of access to care,” he says. “Things like a second heart attack or a second stroke, and when I’d dig down to find out how things reached this point, people would tell me their story.”
Many were ashamed, he says, as they recounted divorces, layoffs and circumstances beyond their control that resulted in losing their health insurance. “Because of that, they couldn’t pay the doctor’s fees, and because of that, they couldn’t get medication refills,” Oyeyemi says.
“It would almost trigger that same feeling I had years ago – the same powerlessness,” he says. “I couldn’t believe I was seeing the same exact thing. We’re in the best country in the world, and yet the same suffering from there is exactly what I found here.”
He recalls a case from almost a decade ago – a retired school teacher who’d just suffered a second heart attack because of a condition that should have been controlled with medication. “Her voice was cracking as she shared that she went through a divorce, lost health insurance, couldn’t afford to see the doctor to get her $4 medication refilled, and that’s why she’d had another heart attack,” he says. “I just went, ‘Oh my god, I can’t stand to not do something about this.’”
An idea began to take shape for Oyeyemi: What if he could build a clinic specifically for patients like these. One where you could have access to primary and preventative care, even if you didn’t have health insurance. And of course, it would need to be free. At first, it seemed like a dream.
“I started by sharing the idea with colleagues in the hospital,” he says. Right away, those colleagues were interested. He recruited a team of about eight other doctors and nurses, and then set about trying to find a space to house the clinic.
“I presented the idea to my mosque here in Cherry Hill,” he says, “and almost without hesitation, the board of my mosque goes, ‘Yeah, this is what it’s about. We have to support this.’”
The leadership of the Gracious Center of Learning and Enrichment Activities, which occupies a large building in an industrial park just off the Turnpike, had some extra room. “They walked me over to the other side of the mosque, which has property that’s usually rented out,” he says, “and they go, ‘What about this?’ And it’s about 5,000 square feet of space. I realized we were really doing this.”
The Cherry Hill Free Clinic opened in 2017, and at first it only operated one Saturday each month. Today, it’s open nearly every day. “The only healthcare institution that’s open more times than us is the emergency room,” Oyeyemi says.
He now has a rotating volunteer staff of some 60 medical professionals. “A third of us are primary care docs, and the others are specialties like psychiatry, nutrition, cardiology, rheumatology,” he says. “If you need to see a specialist, just the out-of-pocket costs to see those folks – you’re talking close to 500, 600 bucks just for the initial evaluation.”
At the Cherry Hill Free Clinic, those appointments are, well, free, to any New Jersey resident who attests they don’t have health insurance. The biggest volume of patients come from Camden, Burlington and Gloucester Counties, in that order, but people drive from Atlantic City, Trenton, Elizabeth and even farther.
About 20 specialties are accounted for among the volunteers, who Oyeyemi often refers to as “angels.” Some of the doctors drive from several hours away to volunteer on their days off. “We morph the clinic into whatever specialty is volunteering that day,” he says. “One day it’s a women’s health clinic with a mammogram van parked out front and a few of our gynecologist volunteers doing pap smears and pelvic exams. The next shift, it could be the optometrist doing eye exams. The next shift could be the cardiologist.”
The clinic has seen an estimated 10,000 patients to date, Oyeyemi says, and “an overwhelming amount of them are people living with chronic illnesses like hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol, mental health and depression issues, anxiety and endocrine thyroid disorders.”
The clinic can draw labs, take x-rays and ultrasounds and do other procedures. It depends on community partners like local hospitals who offer things like endoscopies, MRIs and CAT scans to Cherry Hill Free Clinic patients at no charge. “Ours is really an incredible story of the community coming together,” Oyeyemi says.
About half the clinic’s funding comes from grants, including more than $76,000 awarded by NBCUniversal Local Impact Grants in 2025, and from hospital partners.
“Another third comes from major gifts from foundations, and the rest is essentially crowdsourced by people who hear about us and go, ‘I want to be a part of that.’ If there’s someone out there reading this who feels that way, I invite them to come get some of this good karma,” Oyeyemi says. “When you’re there for your neighbor, good things happen to you.
Good things have certainly happened to Oyeyemi, he says. Though he still works for Virtua Health full-time, he doesn’t hesitate to spend as many of his off-hours as possible in the clinic. “I assure you I get more out of my service in clinic than I give,” he says. “The sweetness of volunteerism is indescribable. The American Medical Association has written about providers getting back the joy of medicine from volunteerism. There’s a lot that’s been written about burnout in healthcare, and this work just brings you back to the why.”
For Oyeyemi, that “why” is very, very simple: people need care, and they deserve to get it.
“At any point, life can happen to any one of us,” he says. “To be able to help a person go through a tough time, so they can then go work and feed their family, is part of being a community. Health is a basic right. It’s a basic need. To be able to be there for folks – it’s really a remarkable thing.”
