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Affirmations, Corktown Health Center Announce Partnership With Details to Be Revealed

Over the last 30 years Ferndale's Affirmations LGBTQ community center has been focused on providing Southeast Michigan's LGBTQ community with not only social but community support services. Now, the center is set to expand its offerings to include health care. This is made possible because of a joint partnership with Corktown Health Center, which focuses specifically on LGBTQ health services, that will serve to expand the reach of Corktown as well.
Mike Flores, formerly Affirmations' board president, announced at a community event last month that he will be stepping down from his position at the center to oversee this partnership via a new staff position at Corktown.
"I will be focused on this partnership, that will be one of my primary roles, and make sure that we are able to meet milestones, to be able to execute on the plan that we're going to share in the future," he said.
As of right now, the exact nature of the partnership is yet to be revealed but Flores said there are plans for the release of a community announcement with more details by the end of 2019. He did say, however, that it won't be long before regulars at Affirmations will start to notice a positive change in the community center.
"I think the first thing that most visitors to the center will notice is that they will now have direct access to information related to health care, the services that may be available to them in the community, beyond just the [current] resources that we provided at Affirmations," he said.
He said that the idea for the partnership came about last year, when Affirmations was facing financial difficulties and focused on forging stronger community relationships.
"Back in November of last year the board made a strategic decision that we could not do business as usual and what that meant was that we really needed to think outside of the box in terms of how we were going to make Affirmations sustainable. And one of the conclusions that we came up with was we needed to have partnerships that allowed us to provide additional service to the community," Flores said. "So, what we've been doing over the last year now is talking to several organizations about potential partnerships and one of the areas that we wanted to focus in on was health care. And it was just a natural progression to start conversations with Corktown, because, obviously, they have a focus in the LGBT community. Obviously, we do as well, and it just made sense for us to do some initial touchpoints with each other to see if there was an opportunity for us to start discussing partnerships."
Affirmations Board Vice President Cheryl Czach will step into the interim president role. This is a developing story.
To find out more about Corktown Health Center visit corktownhealth.org. To learn more about Affirmations visit goaffirmations.org.

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