The Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus - A Catalyst for the Region

Since 2002, an organization in New York States second-largest city has successfully combined innovation, job creation, and urban revitalization. In Buffalo, against one of the toughest backdrops of American urban decline, a group of community leaders, elected officials, and heads of the regions health care and medical education institutions banded together to create a not-for-profit organization called the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus (BNMC), Inc. The new organization was tasked with turning a 70-acre section of downtown Buffalo into a cohesive campus and fostering collaboration and planning among its member institutions; yet it became much more. Thanks to extraordinary leadership and broad local, state, and national support, BNMC, Inc. is now a case study in successful public-private partnerships and a proof point for an inside-out urban revitalization process based on principles of mutuality that can be the solution to some of todays toughest problems.