Client: Fenway Community Health
Project/Product: Briefing Book and Case Statement

Fenway Community Health is a Boston-based community health center that specializes in providing the highest-quality care to sexual-minority communities. It also helps educate medical professionals about, and conducts research into, the medical needs of those communities.

In 2004, Fenway hired us to research and write a case statement for an ambitious campaign to fund the construction of a new main building. We wrote a briefing book and a case statement, and also generated numerous collateral texts (invitations, speeches, etc.) along the way. Carter Halliday, a design firm specializing in educational and not-for-profit clients, worked closely with us on all aspects of the campaign, including coming up with its name.


Briefing book excerpt:

Fenway Community Health is on the cutting edge of health care in America.

Today, people want assurance that they can get high-quality, affordable health care. Fenway provides that assurance to anyone who walks in the door. In particular, Fenway strives to provide skilled and compassionate care to Boston’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) populations, as well as to the people who live and work in our Fenway neighborhood.

Together with our research arm, The Fenway Institute, we accomplish three critical tasks:
• We provide high-quality and comprehensive care to anyone who needs it.
• We develop essential new knowledge.
• We teach caregivers how to provide specialized care to populations whose health-care needs traditionally have been neglected.

Now we need to expand these services—and extend our compassionate care, our research, and our teaching—in ways that will benefit even broader populations.

Through a careful strategic planning effort, we have identified $16 million in expenditures that are needed to strengthen and expand our work. At the heart of this campaign is a ten-story health facility and community resource, to be built in the West Fens near the Longwood Medical Area.
To that end, we are launching a comprehensive fundraising campaign.
We need your help.

10 Stories Case Statement excerpts:

Why ten stories?
Because Fenway Community Health is seeking to build a new, state-of-the-art, ten-story facility on Boylston Street in Boston’s West fens neighborhood, so it can provide more and better services to an ever-growing client community. It seeks to endow and provide operating support to some of the activities that will go on in this new facility. That story is told in the following pages.

And because in the following pages, you’ll also find personal perspectives from ten members of the Fenway community, broadly defined. They help explain why Fenway is a rare and vital resource that deserves your support.

Why Fenway is special
We treat people regardless of their ability to pay—because healthcare must be a right, not a privilege. We are always inclusive, and never exclusive.

We serve as a “sentinal site.” We monitor the emerging health issues of sexual-minority populations—and we respond to problems immediately with focused community health initiatives. For example: When the crystal meth scourge swept across new England, The Fenway Institute developed a curriculum to educate health-care professionals and social service workers about treatment options.

We help people who have nowhere else to turn. Last year, our LGBT Helpline and Peer Listening Line logged more than 5,000 calls from people across North America—mostly young and troubled, some desperate.

We exert an impact far beyond Boston. Through collaborative relationships with researchers in the U.S. and around the world, we are shaping the future of inquiry into HIV infection, LGBT health, and other issues of concern to our patient population.

We look for leverage. For example: working with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, we developed a sexually transmitted disease “tool kit” for physicians of gay and bisexual males.

We innovate. More than 20 years ago, we launched one of the nation’s first alternative insemination (AI) programs that provided services to lesbians and single mothers. Since that time, our AI clients have given birth to more than 250 children.

We respond. In the months following the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, Fenway provided same-sex, premarital screening appointments for more than 1,000 clients.

We tackle the tough challenges with enthusiasm and sensitivity. When the transgender community asked for increased services, we responded by creating the Transgender Health Program in 2004, which today serves some 200 clients.

We save lives. Our Violence Recovery Program, founded in 1986, provides counseling, support groups, advocacy, and referral services to victims of bias crime, domestic violence, sexual assault, and police misconduct.