The Community Resource Center is preparing to launch a capital campaign to help pay for its home on 134 Center Ave. in the village of Mamaroneck.
The money raised will go toward paying off the building’s mortgage, according to Liz Liscio, the capital campaign chairwoman, who added that the campaign could last for at least a full year.
“[The center] is going to get together a narrative about the history of how we came to purchase this building and what it’s meant for the community,” Liscio said ahead of the campaign’s launch. The Community Resource Center, CRC, plans to have a soft launch to kick off the campaign around the end of May, with a shift to a higher gear in the fall.
Formerly known as the Hispanic Resource Center, the 17-year-old organization’s aim was to take on a new identity in order to better serve the communities of Mamaroneck and Larchmont upon moving to its new location in September last year.
The Center Avenue building was purchased with monies raised from individual donations.
“We do have a mortgage that we’re trying to pay off now, as well as raise a rainy-day fund,” Liscio said.
Liscio added that the reason why the campaign is happening almost a year after the CRC moved into the Center Avenue building is due to how much work relocating has entailed. “We always knew we wanted to do a capital campaign, but given all the other things we had to do, there just wasn’t time; now’s the time to do it,” she said.
Liscio made it clear that this campaign is not due to recently expired U.S. Department of Justice grant. “That’s the way the federal government does it,” she said. “They fund you for two years, and then they donate funds to somebody else. Our two-year program ran beautifully—it was our domestic violence program—but [the funding] is over.”
Earlier this year, the CRC entered a grant partnership with the National Domestic Worker Alliance, which works to provide labor protections for domestic workers.
Liscio said that going from a tenant to a building owner involves getting insurance, and that at the time of the move, the CRC was en route to hiring a new executive director. Also, the CRC could only raise half of the money—around $375,000—needed to buy the building, hence the mortgage to pay for the $750,000 location.
Milan Bhatt, the executive director of the CRC, previously told the Review that the organization’s goal is to “integrate the immigrant community.”
Hispanics make up nearly 24 percent of the village of Mamaroneck’s population, according to the 2010 U.S. Census. The CRC’s programming includes a domestic violence program called Voz y Vida; social and human services; a worker center that fights for low-wage immigrant work rights; and free youth development programs for ages 2 through 18. The nonprofit was recently accredited by the Board of Immigration Appeals to provide legal services for immigrants.
