A Groundbreaking Moment for Colony Park
May 22, 2026
Decades of resident advocacy bring care closer to home in Northeast Austin
Mere feet from the construction site of the forthcoming Colony Park Health & Wellness Center lies a stop sign and two new streets, named after the original change-makers of Colony Park: Barbara Scott Plaza and Helen Miller View.
Five decades ago, two of the neighborhood’s first residents made their homes in this Northeast Austin community and worked toward a better future as members of the Colony Park Neighborhood Association.
Now, their legacies will live on.
“I’m glad future communities will know that they had community workers working toward all of this,” said Scott, the president emeritus of the Colony Park Neighborhood Association who first moved to the neighborhood in 1974. “We did that for them. We fought for this. We want them to know that they have a right to whatever we fought for, that nobody can come here now and tell them that this is not for you.”
A day worth celebrating
On Saturday, May 16, the Central Health system recognized the community’s long-term advocacy during its groundbreaking for the new facility, which will change health care for thousands of Colony Park residents.
In the past, Scott says, she’s gone everywhere from Rundberg to Round Rock to receive health care.
About a year from now, when Central Health projects the facility to open in summer 2027, it will be mere minutes away for a growing community of about 20,000 residents, according to Central Health’s last demographic report of the area in 2022. The $37 million, 34,000-square foot facility is planned to feature primary care and dental care, along with pharmacy services, wellness programs, and even a small library when it opens.
“This is the progress we’ve made in the last 10 years,” Scott said.
A milestone moment
Over 60 community stakeholders were on-hand to celebrate the groundbreaking on Saturday, from U.S. Representative Lloyd Doggett to Austin City Council Member Natasha Harper-Madison, Travis County Commissioner Jeff Travillion, Manor City Council Member Aaron Moreno, and Equidad ATX President Ashton Cumberbatch.
Wearing identical purple shirts, roughly two handfuls of community members from the Colony Park Neighborhood Association were also there—people like Scott, Miller, Algie Williams, Sarah Jackson, and Margarita Decierdo.
“This was a vision of our hard work,” Scott said.
They weren’t going to miss it.
“We had to continue to fight for what we wanted in our community,” said Williams, 79, also one of the community’s first residents.
Central Health Board Chair Geronimo Rodriguez said the day represented the kind of growth the system is continuing to work toward every day.
“I think it’s important to celebrate milestones along the way,” Rodriguez said. “I think it aligns with the community, and with life in general. Life is a series of moments. It’s not a straight line. You have to celebrate these moments as you continue to think about the future and the vision of the organization.”
Planning for the future
In 2014, a year after the City of Austin earned a $3 million-dollar federal grant, a master plan for “The Colony Park Sustainable Community” was approved for a vacant lot on 208 acres of city-owned land.
The future vision was a mixed-use area filled by a community of mixed-income people, along with single-family and multi-family housing and businesses. In 12 years since, new houses and neighborhoods have arrived.
But that future, and its accompanying resources, haven’t always come quickly for a community that was born out of an annexation in 1972, Scott says.
While residents have lived in the area for decades, by 2000 it still lacked a grocery store, health clinic, restaurants and parks.
Central Health and CommUnityCare Health Centers arrived in 2019 with a mobile medical clinic. The mobile unit offered primary care and pharmacy services to the community.
Two years later, Central Health opened the Northeast Health Resource Center on the campus of the Austin ISD’s Volma Overton Elementary. The one-level health care facility today provides MAP (Medical Access Program) and MAP Basic enrollment assistance for Travis County residents with low income, in-person WIC eligibility help, and referrals to other resources.
In about a year, the Colony Park Health & Wellness Center will provide health care solutions to a neighborhood where 54% of residents utilized Central Health services in FY 2021. The most common chronic illness in Colony Park, according to the 2022 demographic report, is cardiovascular disease.
Looking Ahead to the Future
Seven years ago, Harper-Madison began her Austin City Council term in District 1, which is anchored by Eastern Travis County. She’s now the chair of the City of Austin Housing and Planning Committee, which reviews housing, land and mobility issues, along with neighborhood planning and comprehensive plans.
Colony Park and its residents, she says, are important to her.
On Saturday, she talked about a bright future.
“Ultimately, when I think about District 1 and I think about the folks in Colony Park and their primary advocacy methods, I believe that no community, despite their zip code, should do without,” she said.
Harper-Madison smiled when she urged the community—located just six miles from downtown Austin—to continue to advocate for resources.
“We’re talking about meeting people’s basic needs,” she said. “We’re talking about wellness, and the overall resilience of communities.”
Change takes time, service, and most of all, people willing to go the extra mile. On Saturday, eight members of the neighborhood association signed their names on a white hard hat and wrote messages of hope and encouragement on a beam that will be built into the new facility.
It was recognition that all good things can be done with persistence, Williams said.
That’s an idea Central Health can get behind, too.
“Moments like today are really important in the life of an organization, and we’ll celebrate that,” Rodriguez said.