Donate to CRE
Join our Mail List

CRE Success Stories
Photo credit: Cyndi Shattuck Photography

Our Team
At CRE, our staff is our greatest asset - an intellectually and culturally diverse team able to offer an array of services with a commitment to results.

"CRE's goal is to enable client organizations to build what we consider the "three-legged stool" for high-performing organizations: solid, visionary leadership, strong and efficient organizational systems, and effective programming that links strategy, planning and outcomes."

- Holly Delany Cole
CRE Deputy Director

Become a Client
"I think CRE really knows what nonprofits need. We've used CRE for Board development, for financial development, and after we spun off, also legal referral - and consistently, through different services & needs, it's been the case that they've been right on target & very helpful. "

- Chris Norwood, ED, Health People

Our Services: Case Studies: Rockaway Waterfront Alliance

Rockaway Waterfront Alliance

Services Provided:  Advisor, Strategic Planning, Fundraising, Hiring Employees

Our Successes:

  • Helped the Rockaway Waterfront Alliance (RWA) obtain its first funding allowing the organization to grow from a protest group into a community development organization.
  • Advised RWA about the process and requirements when it come to hiring employees, after the organization’s expansion required four full-time staffers.
  • More consultations will come now that RWA has won a city contract to build and eco-learning and community center.

In 2005, the Rockaway Waterfront Alliance (RWA) was formed to protest out-of-scale real estate development on the Queens peninsula.

But instead of just contenting themselves with fighting against what they thought didn’t belong in their community, RWA started fighting for what they believed should be there; better parks, playgrounds for the kids, cleaner beaches, an outdoor eco-learning classroom. The RWA’s mission of seeking environmental and social justice hit a cord especially with the youth on Rockaway and soon the one-time protest group was so large that they had to hire four full-time staff members. And recently the city approved RWA’s bid to redevelop the shuttered Rockaway Beach Boulevard Firehouse into a community center.

Jeanne DuPont, RWA’s founder and executive director, said that the Community Resource Exchange (CRE) has been there to guide her organization every step along the way of this nonprofit success story.

“CRE helped us get off the ground from the very beginning,” DuPont says.

In fact, she said it was a CRE consultant who after taking a look at their organization told her that RWA was much more than just a protest group.

“The first thing one of the CRE consultants said to me was you’re doing community planning and community development and I really didn’t even know what that was yet,” DuPont says.

CRE helped DuPont and the other members of the RWA build a template for writing grants enabling them to get their first funding. Soon, the RWA took on a momentum of its own. “It started out really just to raise awareness and has become a movement,” DuPont says. It got to the point where they had to hire four full-time staffers, a process which CRE was able to help them through.

In fact, these days DuPont says “we’re almost growing too quickly and too big. We’ve had to use CRE’s resources now to say, ‘how do we step back from this a bit."

But just as they were doing that the city unexpectedly awarded them a bid to redevelop the old fire on Rockaway Beach Boulevard into a community center called the Rockaway Institute for Sustainable Environment, which they envision being used as a “great hall” for projects and events, catering facilities, an organic café, classrooms for afterschool programs and job training, a roof garden and an “aquaculture center” in the basement.

DuPont says this latest success for the RWA will no doubt necessitate another consultation with CRE.

“We couldn’t have done any of this work without CRE’s help,” DuPont says. “CRE has been the only advisors we have had and they’re the only ones that I call now if I need help. CRE always comes though for me.”

« Go Back