Robert Bowne Foundation

Some dramatic changes are taking place at the Robert Bowne Foundation and we would like to share our plans with you.

The board and staff of the Foundation have decided to close its doors on December 31, 2015.

We have been proud to support youth programs in New York City since the Foundation’s inception in 1968 by the late Edmund A. Stanley, Jr., then President and CEO of Bowne & Co. In 1987, under the leadership of Dianne Kangisser, the Foundation’s work became more focused on afterschool programs that support literacy development, capacity-building strategies to make these programs programmatically and managerially stronger and building the field that has become out-of-school time education.

The Robert Bowne Foundation hosted Strategies for Increasing Family Involvement on October 12, 2011.  This topic was in response to past networking participants’ requests.

Anne Lawrence, program officer for the Foundation, welcomed participants and reminded all of the purpose of the networking meetings: to offer a forum for participants from across the city and a range of out-of-school time (OST) programs to come together to share their work and to dialogue on important issues in the field.

The structure for this Networking meeting differed a bit from past meetings in that the group engaged in a brief whole group discussion, followed by a “case study”, a presentation on the evolution of family involvement at the Arts and Literacy Afterschool Program at the Coalition for Hispanic Family Services (CHFS) by Laura Paris, the director. Afterwards there were small group activities and discussion to support participants in developing a strategic plan for the next year to increase family involvement in their programs.