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It’s been a year since nonprofit Community First Solutions confirmed plans to renovate a downtown Hamilton building for its new headquarters office, and downtown’s recovery has made big strides during the time renovations have taken place.
While construction crews were busy remodeling the empty former Ringel's Furniture building into modern office space for Community First, plans for the call center StarTek Inc. to open in the former Elder-Beerman building on High Street were announced. The project promises to create nearly 700 jobs by the time operations are fully ramped up. StarTek opened in July with the first group of employees in the renovated space.
High Street Café, serving breakfast and lunch, opened its doors at 250 High St. Also, retailer and nonprofit Made to Love opened this summer at 6 South Second St. selling goods made by Haitian artists.
And now Community First joins the rest downtown by opening its new headquarters. About 50 employees moved Aug. 3 into the 35,000-square-foot building. While the old entrance was at 223 South Third Street, the changes moved the entrance to the new address of 230 Ludlow Street, according to the organization.
Approximately $5.8 million was invested in the upgrades.
“I feel more connected to the community,” Jeff Thurman, president and chief executive officer of Community First, said.
Thurman has always said choosing to move downtown was about more than just a building. It’s a commitment to downtown revitalization, he said.
“We could have gone anywhere,” Thurman said, referring to Community First’s other locations in Hamilton as well as Middletown and West Chester Twp.
Community First is the parent holding company of these four nonprofits: Colonial, Community Behavioral Health Inc., Community First Pharmacy and Partners in Prime. Altogether, the divisions and parent company, which provides back-office services, employ about 700 people. That makes it one of Hamilton’s top five largest employers, according to the city’s records.
The headquarters were relocated from a building on Eaton Avenue next to Fort Hamilton Hospital, which the staff outgrew. The property was sold to the hospital's health system, Kettering Health Network.
Downtown, the new Community First facility acts as a resource center for employees. It houses shared services staff such as accounting, technology, marketing, human resources and executive leadership in one place, with extra room to grow. Features also include a 60-seat meeting and conference room.
Key benefits of the new location for the growing provider of home health care, behavioral health services and discount pharmacy prescriptions include a more central location to its various operations throughout Butler County. Other benefits of the new space are amenities such as a cafe and wellness center to help recruit new employees to work at the organization and a prominent presence that could boost Community First Solutions’ name recognition, leaders say.
“We’re making lots of changes right now; structural changes and how we look at things,” Thurman said.
“This building is actually the platform, sort of like the springboard to where we want to head,” he said. “It gives us the support services that we need to be able to grow. It’s not purely the physical building. It’s more about the fact that we have all the expertise in one place and the ability to grow in this space.”
Next up for downtown is the opening of the delayed Artspace Hamilton Lofts, with 42 apartments for artist living and street-level commercial storefronts. Also the other tenants at the former Elder-Beerman building should move in as renovations are finished. Joslin Diabetes Center at Fort Hamilton Hospital, Jackson's Market and Deli, and Butler County Board of Developmental Disabilities art initiative InsideOut Studio are also set to open at 150 High Street in the same building as StarTek.
“We’ve been so welcomed by the other businesses, by restaurants, by stores,” said Danielle Webb, vice president of marketing for Community First. “Across the board it just feels good to be down here because people are so excited to have us.”
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Meanwhile, Community First has also started construction on a more than $12 million post-surgery, medical rehabilitation facility on Hamilton's west side, along Main Street. Plans are to build the new 42-bed, 42,000-square-foot medical facility near the intersection of Main Street and Stahlheber Road to open in 2017. The new center would offer post-surgery rehabilitation health care with modern amenities, Community First officials say.
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