Non-profit's build a unique idea  

Community Service marks anniversary

By MIKE CHALMERS   

The News Journal Staff reporter
09/12/2002

For five years, the 12-story building at 10th and Orange streets has been an anomaly among its downtown Wilmington neighbors.

The Community Service Building charges a bare-minimum rent and features a directory of 74 tenants focused on helping people, rather than making money. The building is open only to nonprofit organizations, from tiny civic groups to some of Delaware's most extensive social service agencies.

Next week, tenants will mark the fifth anniversary of the former DuPont Co. building's new life.

"This is where the action is," said Antoine J. Allen, president of the Metropolitan Wilmington Urban League, which moved into the building when the organization formed almost three years ago.

"We were talking about where we wanted to locate, and there was no discussion other than the Community Service Building," Allen said. "It gives you a sense of a corporate setting, and that's what we wanted."

The building, operated by the nonprofit Community Service Building Corp., is probably the largest collection of nonprofit groups in the country, said Diane Kaplan Vinokur, an associate professor of social work at the University of Michigan, who has studied such centers. She will speak at next week's event.

Built in 1925, the structure was known as the Montchanin Building and housed DuPont workers for many years. DuPont decided to sell the building because the company and the philanthropic Longwood Foundation were getting a constant stream of requests from nonprofits for help in paying building expenses.

The Community Service Building Corp. spent about $24 million - most of it donated by the Longwood Foundation - to buy the building and a nearby lot, renovate the structure and erect a 473-slot parking garage a block away, said Jerry A. Bilton, executive director of the corporation. The building features about 173,000 square feet of office space and houses about 500 workers.

"We tore this whole building down on the inside," Bilton said. "We stripped it. Everything is new here."

The building opened April 1, 1997, with six nonprofit tenants and DuPont workers occupying about half of the building, Bilton said. "As other nonprofits wanted to come to the building, DuPont would remove itself, floor by floor," he said.

Nonprofit tenants finally filled the building about a year and a half ago, and there are 20 organizations on a waiting list for office space.

Tenants lease their offices at $8.23 per square foot, with $2 of that cost going into a capital fund and the rest going to pay operating and maintenance expenses of the building, Bilton said.

Similar office space downtown costs $18 to $25 a square foot, said Connie McCarthy, executive director of the Wilmington Economic Development Corp., which is also a tenant.

The Delaware office of the National Conference for Community and Justice, which fights bias and racism, moved to the building about a week ago from offices at the First and Central Presbyterian Church a few blocks away. Executive Director Lisa Oursler said the church office was nice, but she felt isolated, with just three full-time workers in the organization.

"For a small nonprofit, being in [the Community Service Building] that has that energy - the people, the ideas - was a real boost for us," she said. "And it legitimizes us as a nonprofit."

The American Red Cross of Delmarva Peninsula, one of the building's first tenants, occupies the building's entire fifth floor and part of the ninth floor. The group runs its disaster-response services from the office, meets disaster victims and conducts training there. It keeps a fleet of cars and disaster-response vehicles in the building's parking garage.

"We love it," said Chief Executive Officer Margi Prueitt. "Our purpose is providing human services, not managing a building."