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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
"One of things I appreciate about CRE is that it understands about organizational capacity. CRE begins with what the organization has and what it practically can do."

- Maya Iwata, ED, Sisterhood Mobilized for AIDS/HIV Research & Treatment, Inc. [SMART]

Our Services: Case Studies: Brownsville Multi-Service Family Health Center

Brownsville Multi-Service Family Health Center

Services Provided:  Fundraising, Creation of Permanent Position of Fund Developer

Our Successes:

  •  Aided Brownsville Multi-Service Family Health Center (BMS) in its first capital campaign which resulted in more than $1.3 million raised in grants, donations and financing.
  •  Enabled them to open the BMS Life & Wellness Center and immediately double its space and capacity for its HIV/AIDS services.
  • Helped BMS establish the position of Fund Developer and that person has been directly responsible for obtaining grants totaling more than $14 million in recent years.

Broken down by zip codes, the service area of the Brownsville Multi-Service Family Health Center (BMS) encompasses four of what the state has designated as Brooklyn’s 17 “high need” areas. The total number of residents within a short distance of BMS is nearly 275,000 residents or more than a quarter of the borough’s total high need population.

In this stretch of Brooklyn, encompassing all or parts of Brownsville, East New York, Ocean Hill, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights and Canarsie, the healthcare professionals at BMS deal with it all: diabetes, obesity, mental illness, substance abuse, oral health care, prenatal care, teenage pregnancy, HIV/AIDS and domestic and street violence. In a single recent year, BMS cared for approximately 13,000 medical patients, 4,000 dental patients and 3,000 mental health/substance abuse patients, and approximately 20,000 non-medical clients. Since its opening in 1992, BMS has serviced the equivalent of more than half the surrounding community’s total population.

In 2000 BMS was in drastic need of expanding its HIV/AIDS services. But while the team at BMS could tell you everything you needed to know about what ailed the good people of Central Brooklyn, they couldn’t diagnose the best way to solve their own space shortages.

As a recipient of HIV/AIDS grant funding from the state and federal governments, BMS qualified for technical assistance and was soon partnered with Community Resource Exchange (CRE), which was able to assist them to find a cure for the problem.

CRE helped BMS launch its first ever capital campaign, which resulted in more than $600,000 in grants and donations and another $750,000 in bank financing. These funds enabled BMS to renovate a three-story building, at the corner of Rockaway & Pitkin Avenues, into the BMS Life & Wellness Center, Joseph K. Francois Pavilion (named after BMS’ first CEO). This site was opened to house BMS’ HIV/AIDS case management and prevention services, and their Women, Infant, and Children’s (WIC) nutrition program. The move immediately allowed BMS to double its space and greatly expand the capacity of its HIV/AIDS services.

“CRE was very instrumental in helping us with this project,” Yanick Manigat, the Assistant Operating Officer at BMS, said. “What they gave us was guidance, contacts, training, and encouragement; it’s really hard to quantify.”

Ms. Manigat said CRE was there from the start to the finish; a guiding force in coordinating the specifics of the fundraising such as deciding on the best methods of soliciting donations, finding good foundation matches for grant possibilities, helping to obtain the bank financing and even reminding BMS that once it was all over they needed to have a grand opening ceremony to thank all of those who helped to make the new Life & Wellness Center a reality.

Nine years later, BMS has doubled its operating budget to over $18 million annually, grown from three sites to eight (with two more in the works); they are, with 250 employees, the second largest non-governmental employer in the Brownsville area.

“Much of this growth is attributable to the vision and guidance of our executive leadership,” Ms. Manigat said. “And the support of CRE and its CEO, Fran Barrett, was an impetus and facilitated this growth strategy.”

In addition to the one-time fundraising effort, at CRE’s urging, BMS established a development/project management unit in 2000 as a way to raise money for program and capacity building projects going forward. To that end, CRE facilitated the creation of a Development Fellowship program, funded through the federal Office of Minority Health, to hire and train Development Fellows for HIV/AIDS organizations across the City. Marcia Lawrence, one of these Development Fellows, became and still serves as BMS’s Fund Developer. Over the past nine years she, in cooperation with Ms. Manigat, has been directly responsible for obtaining capital, program and capacity-building grants totaling well over $14 million, Ms. Manigat says.

“We love CRE and rely on them still for guidance, support and cheerleading,” Ms Manigat says. “They have certainly been pivotal in shifting BMS’ trajectory.

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