Our Capital Campaign: The Space to THRIVE
As the anchor agency of the Island across all six towns, Martha’s Vineyard Community Services offers a steady heartbeat of comprehensive support from birth to advanced age. In this work, the right space matters. We proudly culminated the completion of the first phase of our Space to THRIVE Capital Campaign with the opening of the Paul & Sandra Pimentel Early Childhood Center.
We now turn our attention to our main campus. Built in the mid-1980s, our aging buildings are outmoded, flood-prone, and overcrowded. Our core facilities lack elevators, automatic doors, and wheelchair accessibility. Indoors, we lack modern ventilation and energy efficiency. Our walls are thin and insufficient for privacy. Outside, a confusing maze of buildings and uneven pathways provides a challenging entranceway for clients of all ages and abilities.
It is time to build for the future of community health and wellbeing.
Our proposed new Main Community Service Center will use best-practice design for comprehensive, behavioral health services. Our new facilities will house our Community Behavioral Health Center, dually licensed and nationally accredited outpatient mental health and substance abuse clinic, “open access” and other same-day behavioral health services, disability services, Veterans services, elder services and supplemental domestic and sexual violence services—all on campus.
Envision with us a Space to THRIVE…a campus brilliantly designed to meet the evolving needs of our year-round and seasonal island community.
- Universally accessible space that welcomes every client arriving on campus.
- Private space that inspires safety, dignity, and confidentiality for every individual and family.
- Meeting space that fosters collaboration among service providers and community partners.
- State-of-art space that allows for hybrid staffing and telehealth-compatible infrastructure.
- Environmentally efficient space that offers durability for generations to come.
Our campaign milestones are being met in full.
- Over the past four-plus years, this major new construction project has been propelled forward by the generosity of one hundred percent (100%) of our Board members, who launched our Space to THRIVE drive by contributing the first $1 million cornerstone gift.
- That collective charitable investment has been magnified by record philanthropy of Island families, notably including a record gift of $2 million by Jim & Susan Swartz, which named the Paul & Sandra Pimentel Early Childhood Center, and an historic $3 million by Jacqui Morby and her children, which will name the new Morby Family MV Community Services building, currently under construction.
- At the close of 2024, a wonderful $500,000 matching grant by the Martha’s Vineyard Bank Charitable Foundation inspired significant year-end support, elevating a successful drive to fund and name a future wing of our new facility as the William & Rose Styron Center for Wellness & Recovery.
- On May 2, 2025, MV Community Services convened a joyful Groundbreaking Ceremony, thanks to Island-wide donors and partners who helped achieve our $12.5 million ”shovel-in-the-ground” target.
- Heralding the campaign’s close, a $1 million “last-dollar-in” Expansion Grant by MVYouth in fall 2025 was joined by significant “capstone” support to name the building’s Welcome Center and main waiting room in memory of late beloved Island lawyer Ron Rappaport and his family.
- By December 2025, our Space to THRIVE campaign goal of $17.5 million was achieved in full. As construction proceeds throughout 2026 under the leadership of Interim CEO Scott Turton, this means our modern new building and greenspace will open on time and on budget in October 2026.
Learn more
Visit our campus in-person to learn more about our current progress and future plans.
Contact
To join this community effort, please contact Campaign Officer Sandy Sedacca, (617)583-3848(mobile), ssedacca@mvcommunityservices.org. Thank you!!