Gala 2025 - VIP Community Services

Dear Friends and Community Partners,

Please join us on October 9th for our 50th Anniversary Gala. Our theme, Honoring the Past, Shaping the Future, speaks to the impact VIP has made on individuals, families, and communities in the last half-century. It signifies our commitment to be here for the next 50 years as the advocate for, and partner to, people who are marginalized, who lack access to services, and who deserve our support.

VIP has been and will continue to be at the forefront of working to address key social impediments to optimal health. Access to primary and specialty care is but one aspect to good health – the others are stable housing, mental health services, treatment, support for substance use disorders, care coordination, job readiness, and food security, to name a few.

Our event is an opportunity for you to celebrate with us, to network, to support VIP’s vital services, and to enjoy a great evening.

Your support helps to ensure VIP’s continued ability to offer desperately needed services to under-resourced communities in New York City, regardless of people’s ability to pay. Please consider serving as a sponsor, purchasing an ad, buying tickets, underwriting the event, or making a financial contribution in support of our programs and the people we serve.

Sincerely,

Debbian Fletcher-Blake
President and CEO

Dear Friends and Community Partners,

Please join us on October 9th for our 50th Anniversary Gala. Our theme, Honoring the Past, Shaping the Future, speaks to the impact VIP has made on individuals, families, and communities in the last half-century. It signifies our commitment to be here for the next 50 years as the advocate for, and partner to, people who are marginalized, who lack access to services, and who deserve our support.

VIP has been and will continue to be at the forefront of working to address key social impediments to optimal health. Access to primary and specialty care is but one aspect to good health – the others are stable housing, mental health services, treatment, support for substance use disorders, care coordination, job readiness, and food security, to name a few.

Our event is an opportunity for you to celebrate with us, to network, to support VIP’s vital services, and to enjoy a great evening.

Your support helps to ensure VIP’s continued ability to offer desperately needed services to under-resourced communities in New York City, regardless of people’s ability to pay. Please consider serving as a sponsor, purchasing an ad, buying tickets, underwriting the event, or making a financial contribution in support of our programs and the people we serve.

Sincerely,

Debbian Fletcher-Blake
President and CEO

HONOREE: Dr. Neil Calman

Dr. Calman is a Board-Certified family physician, President, CEO and co-founder of the Institute for Family Health*, which he has led since 1985. In 2012, Dr. Calman became Professor and System Chair of the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where nearly 300 family physicians are credentialed in its 8 affiliated hospitals.

Thank You to Our Board

We’re grateful for the support of our event committee and board members!
Thank you for making this celebration possible.

Thank You to Our Sponsors

Circle of Hope

good eats (2)

Circle of Love

Circle of Peace

Karen Ashkenase

cigna

Circle of Care

Ponce Bank

chuck and kerston burgess

Tejpal Sandhu

healthfirst

columbia omnicorp

ME -

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Dr. Calman is a Board-Certified family physician, President, CEO and co-founder of the Institute for Family Health*, which he has led since 1985. In 2012, Dr. Calman became Professor and System Chair of the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where nearly 300 family physicians are credentialed in its 8 affiliated hospitals.

For fifteen years, Dr. Calman has been a leader in the national effort to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in health outcomes leading to the Institute’s designation as a National Center of Excellence in the Elimination of Disparities.

Dr. Calman is an elected member of the New York Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Medicine. He is past Board Chair of the Community Health Center Association of New York State (CHCANYS), the American Association of Teaching Health Centers (AATHC), and the New York State Academy of Family Physicians. In 2019, he was appointed to the National Advisory Committee for the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities.

Dr. Calman has also served on many state and national advisory councils, including over two decades on the New York State Council on Graduate Medical Education, and on the Health Information Technology Committee where he served on the Meaningful Use Subcommittee, responsible for establishing the recommendations for the deployment of HIT in practices and hospitals nationwide. He also served on the boards of Healthix and the NY eHealth Collaborative.

To help create the next generation of health care leaders, Dr. Calman started three family medicine residency programs, a nurse practitioner fellowship program and a nurse practitioner residency, designed to train providers to serve the medically underserved.

Dr. Calman is the recipient of many awards including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Community Health Leadership Award, the American Academy of Family Physicians’ Public Health Award, the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Primary Care Achievement Award and the Physician Advocacy Award from the Institute on Medicine as a Profession. He is the recipient of the distinguished Kanter Prize from the Health Legacy Partnership and the Felix A. Fishman Award for Extraordinary Advocacy from New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. In 2024, Dr. Calman received the Leonard Tow Humanism Award and was inducted into the Gold Humanism Honor Society and into Alpha Omega Alpha – the National Medical Honor Society, by the City University of New York Medical School.

Dr. Calman’s published essays include Out of the Shadows (Health Affairs, Jan/Feb 2000); Making Health Equality a Reality: The Bronx Takes Action (Health Affairs, Mar/Apr 2005); and Separate and Unequal Care in New York City (Journal of Health Care Law & Policy 2006). In addition, Dr. Calman contributed to chapters in Caring for America, by John Stannard, To Give Their Gifts, by Richard A. Couto, and Big Doctoring in America, by Fitzhugh Mullan.

When asked what, of all his achievements he is most proud of, Dr. Calman notes that his senior leadership team is comprised of professionals who have risen through the ranks and have more than 22 years, on average, of work with the Institute. As for patients, he states “No One is Ever Turned Away.”

* The Institute for Family Health is a federally qualified community health center network, dedicated to providing primary health services to medically underserved populations. It operates 27 health centers in the Bronx, Manhattan, and the Mid-Hudson Valley, including five school- based health centers, and eight part-time centers that care for people who experience homelessness. The organization serves over 100,000 patients who make 500,000 primary care, behavioral health, oral health and social care visits each year.