A Health Charity’s Leader Serves Poor People in the Shadow of Wealth

It’s 8:15 on a breezy South Florida morning and Yolette Bonnet-Pierre is circulating among the 40 people attending a breakfast at the opulent City Club of the Palm Beaches, several stories above a glittering marina lined by million-dollar-plus homes. Ethel Isaacs Williams, a lawyer, has gathered friends and business colleagues to learn about FoundCare and the Comprehensive AIDS Program of Palm Beach County, two of the three affiliated organizations Ms. Bonnet-Pierre leads.

The Comprehensive AIDS Program’s annual budget has grown from $5-million in 2001, the first year of Ms. Bonnet-Pierre’s leadership, to this year’s projected $11-million. Last year, the 100 staff members at its five offices provided help with food, housing, legal services, and other needs for more than 2,200 people with HIV/AIDS and their family members — some 7,000 clients in all.

Now the Comprehensive AIDS Program and FoundCare, its fund-raising arm, are embarking on a bold new venture.

Amid softly clinking silverware, Ms. Isaacs Williams, a FoundCare board member, introduces Ms. Bonnet-Pierre, who steps up to the podium. Her task: to explain in five minutes why the well-heeled guests should care enough to donate to her groups’ $10-million campaign to build the first nonprofit community health center in Palm Beach County.

She describes the two health-care options currently available to the thousands of low-income residents in the county, where an estimated 20 percent of people have no health insurance. They can go to one of a constellation of understaffed free clinics, where they will be lucky to see the same doctor twice. Or they can spill over into hospital emergency rooms, overwhelming their resources.

Ms. Bonnet-Pierre then outlines another option: a nonprofit facility that provides comprehensive services to needy people regardless of their ability to pay.

The premise is far from quixotic: There are currently more than 1,000 such centers nationwide in needy neighborhoods that qualify for federal support, serving an estimated 16 million people.

Yet Palm Beach — the third most populous county in Florida — has no such nongovernmental facility, and Ms. Bonnet-Pierre is determined to change that. The need is great, as the county encompasses not only Palm Beach and other very affluent coastal areas, but also interior towns where many migrant and seasonal farmworkers live in grinding poverty.

From Haiti to the Bronx

Ms. Bonnet-Pierre’s own history shaped her career decisions, instilling what she calls “a sense of fighting for the underdog.”

An only child, at the age of 11 she left a comfortable life in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where her father was principal of a private school, to join her divorced mother in New York.

Ms. Bonnet-Pierre, 45, recalls the shock of settling in the South Bronx, where she had to step over crack addicts in her building’s stairwells to get to school.

Her mother, Brigitte, worked primarily as a housekeeper, but scraped together enough to enroll Yolette in a private Catholic school. After classes, 16-year-old Yolette journeyed to a Manhattan factory, where she worked alongside her mother and her two aunts.

“I’d do my homework on the subway coming home at midnight,” she says.

At age 19, she married Joseph Pierre. By her mid-20s, she had three children and a job at the insurance company MetLife. But her mother, she says, nudged her toward college: “All along, she made me feel like it was my duty to take the high road, because it was the only reward I could give her.”

After earning an accounting degree in 1991 from the City University of New York, Ms. Bonnet-Pierre took a job at the city’s health department in which she tracked down the sexual partners of people with sexually transmitted infections and urged them to be tested. She later became an HIV counselor.

“Back in those days, in the early 90s, we didn’t have treatment options,” says Ms. Bonnet-Pierre. “When you told somebody they had HIV, you basically gave them a death sentence. All you could do was hold their hands and cry with them.”

Through her job, she began meeting HIV/AIDS activists and became passionate about the issue. “Then my friends started dying all around me,” says Ms. Bonnet-Pierre. She says a friend counseled her on how best to channel her grief: “Become an advocate for people who can’t talk to anyone else.”

So, Ms. Bonnet-Pierre says, “I became that voice.”

Over the next several years she earned a master’s degree in business administration and became an administrator at the Browns-ville Multi-Service Family Health Center, in Brooklyn.

Meanwhile her mother, who had subsisted for years without health insurance, died of a massive stroke at the age of 57. Ms. Bonnet-Pierre says the loss was a catalyst for change, but that she was unsure in what direction to turn: “I put a Post-it on my computer that said, ‘Lord, lead me where you want me to be.’ And I waited.”

The wait ultimately led her in 2001 to the post of chief executive officer at the Comprehensive AIDS Program of Palm Beach County. After more than 15 years of operation, the group was grappling with how best to carry out its mission.

Larry Leed, chief operations officer, says that staff members realized the need to expand and provide clients with some modicum of medical care.

But the expansion plan was relatively modest in scale until Ms. Bonnet-Pierre arrived. Drawing upon her experiences in New York, she proposed a center that would provide “one-stop” health care for uninsured and low-income people, housing adult, pediatric, dental, pharmacy, preventive, and other services under one roof. Ms. Bonnet-Pierre had not only worked at such a center in New York, but had benefited from such services as a young mother and knew firsthand how valuable they could be.

“We needed someone to move us,” says Mr. Leed, “and we found her.”

In 2003 the Comprehensive AIDS Program’s board established FoundCare, which is charged with raising money for both Comprehensive’s HIV/AIDS services and the new center. Both organizations operate under the umbrella of the Comprehensive Community Care Network, a third affiliated charity that provides administrative oversight.

Wooing the Wealthy

After the breakfast at the City Club of the Palm Beaches is over and the guests have filtered out, Ms. Bonnet-Pierre and W. Trent Steele, chair of FoundCare’s board, confer and seem optimistic about two or three prospective donors. But they agree that it’s an uphill battle to persuade wealthy people to support charities that serve needy people.

Mr. Steele, a real-estate lawyer who has volunteered off and on at the Comprehensive AIDS Program for two decades, says that the two most successful fund-raising projects in Palm Beach County — “bar none” — are the Norton Museum of Art and the Raymond F. Kravis Center for the Performing Arts.

“And why do people want to give their money there?” asks Mr. Steele. “It’s because all their friends go to those two institutions and see their names up there. The problem that we have here is that certain people aren’t interested in giving to our campaign because none of those friends are going to go to that clinic and see their names up on the wall once it’s built, so what’s the point?”

Mr. Steele says that it’s been a gradual process of educating potential donors about the benefits of a community health center, a relatively new concept in South Florida.

“There are families of four getting by on poverty-wage levels, working in the hotels, working as housekeepers in Palm Beach, and we have these pockets of poverty that people have no clue about — or don’t want to know about,” Mr. Steele says.

But that’s starting to change, he says, as the charity is now seeking what he calls “the intelligent givers who are the leaders that a lot of the other donors follow.”

These “intelligent givers,” he says, are “hit on for money all the time, and once you get those people educated and on board about the project — and that’s what we’re succeeding in doing — you start to get the swans on board as well.”

Indeed, Friends of FoundCare has garnered an impressive roster since its creation three months ago. Supporters include the philanthropists Evelyn and Leonard Lauder, of the Estée Lauder Companies; Sandra Thurman, president of the International AIDS Trust; and the housewares designer Jonathan Adler and his partner, Simon Doonan.

All told, some $2-million has been raised for the center from foundations and individuals, but FoundCare is still seeking what Jim Sugarman, its chief development officer, calls “that seven-figure gift.” The chase to raise dollars from rich people is fiercely competitive, with up to two or three charity events held each evening during the prime winter and spring season.

And it’s particularly hard for FoundCare to vie for gifts from Palm Beach donors with such out-of-town behemoths as the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science, says Steven Stolman, FoundCare’s director of development.

‘Connecting the Dots’

Despite its challenges in luring wealthy donors, the Palm Beach organization has had significant success in attracting support from grant makers.

The Quantum Foundation, in West Palm Beach, an advocate of the “one-stop” approach for providing comprehensive medical services to poor and uninsured clients, two years ago gave the Comprehensive AIDS Program $414,500 to help build a 28,000-square-foot facility that will supplant its and FoundCare’s headquarters in Palm Springs, an area that the state has designated as “medically underserved.”

Because of that designation, the new center will be eligible to receive federal dollars and participate in a federal program through which medications can be purchased at deeply discounted prices. And it will offer sliding-scale fees to patients, turning no one away, including undocumented workers who may be afraid to use government health services.

Florida Community Health Centers, a nonprofit group in West Palm Beach, will operate and staff the medical clinics. The facility will also house a clinic run by the Comprehensive AIDS Program that will provide wide-ranging HIV/AIDS services, including HIV testing, education, and intensive case management, which runs the gamut from legal-aid referrals to transportation to assistance with housing and food stamps.

Other grants made toward the center’s capital campaign include $79,000 from the Fortin Foundation of Florida, in Palm Beach, and a $50,000 pledge from the Lost Tree Village Charitable Foundation, in North Palm Beach.

Paul Gionfriddo, Quantum’s president, says Ms. Bonnet-Pierre’s leadership has been crucial in crafting her groups’ collaboration with Florida Community Health Centers to meet the county’s dire health-care needs. “She was able to connect the dots between HIV/AIDS services and the broader issues,” he says. “It’s a perfect match at a perfect time.”

And last year the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation gave one of its coveted $105,000 Community Health Leadership Program awards to Ms. Bonnet-Pierre for her work at the Comprehensive AIDS Program and her vision to build a “safety net” health center for county residents.

Uncertain Finances

It’s now 11 a.m., and she is back in her office for a monthly meeting with senior staff members. Because groundbreaking is set to start soon on the new health center, a board member has secured a small suite of offices for Ms. Bonnet-Pierre, her fund-raising team, and her executive assistant in the Kravis Center, while other staff members are sharing space in the Comprehensive AIDS Program’s satellite offices.

Looking out the large window at the panoramic skyline, she jokes that it will be difficult to uproot her staff from the gleaming Kravis Center, even to move to the new state-of-the-art center, which is scheduled to open early next year.

Mr. Leed reports on the move, which is going smoothly, save for some e-mail and other communications glitches, and Marcia Howard, chief financial officer, reminds the others about the group’s forthcoming audit.

The most-pressing issue, however, is the status of the group’s financing under the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Act, which accounts for the bulk of the charity’s support. Because Congress was slow in allotting the money, the Comprehensive AIDS Program — and other HIV/AIDS groups nationwide — doesn’t know how much money it will receive through the program, whose fiscal year began March 1.

Rik Pavlescak, chief program officer, says that groups used to know by December how much to expect. Without the Ryan White money, the group will have to subsist on private donations and can’t plan further than one month ahead, making an already difficult job even harder in a county where 1 in 34 black and 1 in 244 Hispanic residents have HIV/AIDS.

Ms. Bonnet-Pierre says she’s heard that at least one HIV/AIDS group in adjacent Broward County has already shut its doors. “All nonprofits that work on HIV should raise a stink and say this is unacceptable,” she declares, to nods of agreement.

Admiration for Employees

Midafternoon, Ms. Bonnet-Pierre drives six miles to the Palm Springs center to see how the move is proceeding. She chats with the few remaining employees who are boxing up their offices and says hello to a longtime volunteer who has come from New York to help pack and haul equipment.

Ms. Bonnet-Pierre describes how the current building — its roof still punctuated with tarps left over from 2005’s Hurricane Wilma — will be transformed into a structure with a two-story atrium, a fountain, a “wellness garden,” and walls painted in soothing persimmon and ocher shades.

“Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be served in a dignified way,” she says.

Her next stop is at the Comprehensive AIDS Program’s office in Riviera Beach, just north of West Palm Beach. She greets the staff members, some of whom have worked for the group for 13 years. She knows how difficult working on the front lines of HIV can be, and says that she greatly admires her case managers, peer-group educators, and other employees.

Rose Joseph, the regional program manager, is on the phone as Ms. Bonnet-Pierre passes by her office but later comes over to talk. Ms. Joseph asks Ms. Bonnet-Pierre if she remembers an HIV-positive Haitian man with four children who called Ms. Bonnet-Pierre shortly before Christmas. Yes, she replies. Ms. Joseph says she just learned that the man’s wife is pregnant again, with twins, and has also tested positive for the virus. “Oh, Lord,” says Ms. Bonnet-Pierre, shaking her head but seeming unfazed.

She recounts the incident: The man, who spoke English only haltingly, had gotten through to Ms. Bonnet-Pierre, who spoke to him in Creole. He had been injured in an accident, could not work, and had no money while his workers’ compensation claim wound its way through a backlog of cases. The man was unable to pay his rent, and the landlord was posting an eviction notice on his door as he cowered inside his small house, in tears as he spoke on the phone with Ms. Bonnet-Pierre.

“He said, ‘Please help me. I can’t let my children see me like this,’” says Ms. Bonnet-Pierre. She assured him she would do everything in her power to remedy the situation.

She swung into action: “I convened a quick meeting, called a board member who donated $1,000, found monies that could be used to prevent homelessness, all within the afternoon. We were able to pay three months’ rent and connect him with legal-aid services that could move along the claim.

“If supervisors or case managers can’t make something work out for a client, it’s my job to make it happen,” she says. “I say, don’t break the law, but let’s find a way to accommodate the client.”

“Sometimes,” she says, “you don’t even realize the impact, with all the frustration of dealing with funders and everything else, so that some days you don’t even want to wake up.

“But then I find out that I helped save somebody’s life, and that keeps me going. When I meet my maker, all I want to hear is, ‘Well done, kid.’”