Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - A new Community Outreach and Engagement Building will be coming to Michigan Ave. in the spring of 2023 in Buffalo.
Roswell Park Cancer Center alongside elected officials broke ground Wednesday morning on a new outreach building on Michigan Ave. that preserves a building over 100-years-old in the historic Fruit Belt district, adjacent to the Roswell Park campus, which will soon be the home of their new Community Outreach and Engagement (COE) team.
"Roswell Park and our community outreach and engagement team needed an alternative front door somewhere to engage to learn and to have a conversation about eligibility for screening. 907 Michigan will help us tackle issues around health equity more deeply and more effectively," says Dr. Candace Johnson, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center President & CEO.
With funding secured by New York State and the governor, this building will offer guests a variety of resources, "We'll have health education specialists available to answer questions about cancer prevention to help you assess your cancer risk and your eligibility for screening. Another wonderful new addition is our financial empowerment coaching and financial wellness counseling services, because we know that finance, wealth and health go hand in hand. We're going to offer that here and these services are going to be offered for free of course, on weekends, drop in hours, after hours. We wanted to make it totally accessible to the community," says Nikia Clark, Senior Community Outreach & Engagement Manager for Roswell.
Western New York-based Young + Wright Architectural were hired to fulfill the vision of this half-acre site, "The scope involves renovating the existing structure, which will be adapted to house offices and a reception area. We were able to salvage most of the existing structural skeleton and exterior envelope," says Rishawn Sonubi with Young + Wright. In addition, there will be a glass and wood-framed structure that mirrors the scale of the house and an outdoor garden and plaza that can be utilized by Roswell supports, block club and more.
Prior to this announcement, there were many ideas to utilize the space as a parking lot. However, the team at Roswell agreed that have a centralized place to house the COE team would be beneficially for accessibility, as offices were previously spread out across the Roswell campus.
"Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center is known not only in Buffalo in Western New York, but throughout the nation and throughout the world, and the home of many, many firsts in cancer treatment over 150 years," says Congressman Brian Higgins. "These community outreaches are critically important relative to enhancing the effectiveness of cancer care, not only in Buffalo, but what happens here makes it to the nation and to the world, because of the extraordinary work that Candice Johnson and her professionals do every single day."
"I am delighted that Roswell has used its capacity to deliver to this community in a new way, by bringing the care and folks over to do outreach in this building and to expand it so that it can serve other community purposes. This is how we're supposed to do things," said NYS Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes.
See the player below to hear the full announcement: