From a Living Room to a Front Desk: MedCycle Network Partners with AACI
Twelve Advocates and a Living Room
In 1973, twelve community advocates sat down together in the living room of one of their own and decided that Santa Clara County needed something that didn't exist yet: culturally competent mental health care for the wave of Southeast Asian refugees resettling in the Bay Area. They called themselves Asian Americans for Community Involvement, AACI, and the organization they built from that living room has spent the last fifty years growing into whatever its community needed next.
Fifty Years Later, Still Answering the Door
Today AACI is one of the largest community-based organizations in Santa Clara County, and its door is open to nearly anyone who walks through it. Primary care, family dentistry, behavioral health, a center for survivors of torture, shelter for survivors of domestic violence and trafficking through its Asian Women's Home, senior wellness, youth programs, all of it offered in more than 40 languages, regardless of a patient's immigration status or ability to pay. Last year that meant 8,835 patient and client visits and 15,107 behavioral health counseling sessions, thousands of people who found a door that didn't ask them to prove they belonged before it opened. This year, AACI was named California's 2026 Nonprofit of the Year!
A Different Kind of Shortage
MedCycle Network started with a much smaller observation: hospitals across California were setting aside medical supplies and equipment that were still perfectly good, gloves, gowns, wheelchairs, monitors, simply because it was easier to discard them than to find out who might need them next. MedCycle Network was built to close that gap, matching what hospitals no longer need against what community clinics request. What began as a handful of local deliveries has grown into a technology-enabled network that has moved more than $1.8 million in medical surplus to over 25 partner organizations, reaching an estimated 180,000 patients.
Where the Two Stories Meet
That network reached AACI's front desk for the first time this month, when Ernesto Olivares, MedCycle Network's COO and Co-Founder, carried in gloves and wheelchair straps sourced through our partnership with CommonSpirit Health (read more about that partnership here), and set them down at the Gordon N. Chan Community Services Center on Moorpark Avenue. Vanessa Madera was on the other side of the counter to accept them.
What a Glove and a Strap Actually Do
A box of gloves doesn't look like much sitting on a counter. But every exam, every dental visit, every intake conversation conducted in one of AACI's 40 languages depends on having enough of them, and a shortage means a slower line and a longer wait for someone who has already waited long enough to ask for help. A wheelchair strap is smaller still, easy to overlook, until it's the difference between a wheelchair that's just furniture in a hallway and one a patient can actually be moved in safely. Neither item will ever make a headline. Both are exactly the kind of thing AACI has been quietly making sure its patients have since 1973.
A Long-Term Partnership, Just Getting Started
This delivery is the beginning of our relationship with AACI. We'll keep checking AACI's needs list against the surplus already moving through our network, so the next boxes through their door isn't a special occasion, just what happens next.
At MedCycle Network, we believe healthcare is a fundamental human right, in any language. AACI has believed that since a living room in 1973. Together, we're just getting started, one delivery, one device, one community at a time.
Join the Cycle
Whether you're a hospital with surplus supplies, a clinic in need, or a donor ready to make a difference, your support helps us transform medical surplus into health access so more people receive care.
Donate or partner with MedCycle Network today. Together, we're delivering hope, one clinic, one device, one community at a time.