HISTORY

Founded by Drs. Vacharee and Andrew Peterson, Community Dental Care was one of the first private clinics in the Twin Cities that focused primarily on serving low-income patients from all walks of life.

They immediately began to provide a complete array of preventative, restorative, routine, and emergency dental services to an ethnically diverse community of individuals, children, families, and the elderly – mostly people who are in poverty – anyone who needed care.

To ensure continued access to high-quality dental care for the large number of our patients enrolled in public programs, the clinic was incorporated into a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2004 and began serving patients as a nonprofit in 2005. We have demonstrated our ability to expand and cost-effectively scale our services, as evidenced by our previous successful expansions in Maplewood (2008); Robbinsdale (2014); Rochester (2012 and 2017); Buffalo (2022); Crystal (2024) and Carlton Street, the Peter J. King Family Foundation Dental Clinic (2025). This history of strategic growth reflects our strong organizational capacity and commitment to increasing access to care in communities where it is needed most.

Today, with 106 dental chairs and a staff of 300, Community Dental Care provides comprehensive dental care to 140,000 patient visits per year. Community Dental Care is governed by a 12-member board of directors and a three-member advisory council in Rochester.