About Us

Our History:

Community Cradle, formerly known as The Maternal Infant Network (MINCR) has its roots as a perinatal educational outreach program, having received initial outreach grant funding from the New York State Department of Health, Bureau of Women's Health in 1991.

Community Cradle established itself as an independent, not-for-profit organization, and became one of the Comprehensive Prenatal-Perinatal Services Network in 1995. Since then, Community Cradle has been working to remove barriers to accessing community and health services needed by infants and women of childbearing age by offering community education and resources, and by facilitating collaboration of consumers, health providers, and human service providers.

Community Cradle seeks to ensure that our Capital Region families have available the full range of quality, accessible, culturally-sensitive, and continuous health and social services needed to improve pregnancy outcomes and infant health and to promote the health and well-being of the family.

Our Mission:

The Mission of Community Cradle is to take a leadership role in achieving optimal health for mothers and babies in our communities through:

Education
Collaboration
Resources

Outreach and Health Education

Our Structure:

We are a not-for-profit organization governed by a diverse Board of Directors which allows for an equal voice of health and human service providers as well as consumers. Our professional staff consists of an Executive Director, a Perinatal Program Coordinator, and a Health Educator.

Meet the Staff

Lucy Pulitzer, PhD
Executive Director

Meet the Executive Director:

Lucy comes to Community Cradle with an MS degree in Public Health Nutrition from Columbia University and a PhD in Medical Sociology from SUNY Albany. Lucy has developed a nutrition education curriculum for use in a highly diverse area of rural northern California, worked with Southeast Asian refugees at Children’s Hospital in Oakland, and with homebound AIDS patients in Brooklyn. After teaching Medical Anthropology for 15 years to RNs and raising money for health and education programs in Haiti, she was excited to come to Community Cradle and return to her original field of interest, family health. She has a daughter who works in Boston in fund development and a son who is a first year student at SUNY Binghamton.

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Nida Saleem, MPH

Perinatal Program Coordinator

Meet the Perinatal Program Coordinator:

Nida graduated from SUNY New Paltz with a degree in Cell and Molecular Biology and SUNY Albany with an MPH in Epidemiology. Currently she is pursuing a Masters in Public Administration from Marist College, having received a fellowship to pursue her studies from the Islamic Society of North America.

Nida’s most remarkable accomplishment has been collecting and shipping over 14,300 pounds of clothing for the victims of the 2005 South Asia earthquake, which were distributed at hospitals across Pakistan.

She is the proud mother of two young sons and serves on the board of her older son’s preschool.

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Amanda Mulhern, MS
Outreach Specialist

Meet the Outreach Health Educator:

Amanda joined Community Cradle in October of 2007. She received a BA in Personality/Social Psychology from Keene State College in New Hampshire. While deciding on which direction she wanted her career to take, she worked as an assistant for an ENT practice where she coordinated large continuing education programs for physicians, speech pathologists and audiologists. She returned to her studies at Sage Graduate School and completed an MS in Community Health Education in August, 2008.

Amanda has a strong interest in smoking cessation; this fall, she will be providing education and counseling regarding tobacco use to low wage women workers in the hospitality industry as part of a federal grant. She has also completed a rural health survey in Albany, Rensselaer and Schenectady Counties and is seeking grant funding to provide programming in those areas.

A lifelong resident of the Capital Region, Amanda has recently purchased a home in Rotterdam.

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Polly Hartman

Consultant

Meet a Community Cradle Consultant:

Polly was born and raised in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. She received a Bachelors' Degree in elementary education from Carroll College and began teaching kindergarten and first grade in White Plains, NY. She received a Master's Degree in Family and Community Relations from Teacher's College of Columbia University, and a Master's of Library Science from SUNY/Albany and worked as a Children's Librarian at the Bethlehem Public Library until her in retirement in 2006. She provides advice and guidance to Community Cradle as we develop our family and health literacy program.

Polly loves to travel, having recently visited Thailand and Cambodia. She is the proud parent of two sons who are attorneys, and a daughter who is starting law school this year.

Mary Wallen

Volunteer

Meet a Community Cradle Volunteer:

Mary retired from the Albany County Hall of Records after 25 years of service, 18 of them as Executive Director. Her education includes a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and a Master of Library Science degree, both from SUNY Albany. She has worked in public libraries, and brought $800,000 in grant funding to Albany County while employed there.

Mary joined Community Cradle as a volunteer because she wanted to use the skills she has developed over her lifetime to benefit young children and their mothers. She is also a volunteer Court Appointed Special Assistant in both Albany and Rensselaer Family Courts. She has two grown children and five grandchildren.