Harvard To Back Afterschool Initiative Today

Harvard will announce a major new partnership with the City of Boston and several private and non-profit companies today, offering $5 million over the next five years towards expanding afterschool education programs in Boston.

Harvard is also expected to announce another community initiative on Monday, creating the Cambridge Harvard Summer Academy, which will offer summer classes for area high-schoolers.

The newly formed Boston After School for All Partnership--which will be announced at a press conference at noon today--will match the financial and education resources of the University with 11 other partners, including United Way of Massachusetts Bay, Liberty Mutual, Verizon, the Nellie Mae Foundation, and FleetBoston Financial.

The different partners together have committed to providing $23 million over the next five years towards expanding and improving after-school programs throughout Boston. This is the largest public and private partnership in the city's history.

"It's a great beginning for the city," Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino said yesterday. "All of these partners collectively is a great start, and shows a renewal of our commitment to afterschool education."

While some University funds will enter the general Partnership account, much of Harvard's effort will focus specifically on the newly-created Harvard After School Initiative. This program will work specifically in the neighborhoods of Allston/Brighton, Mission Hill and Fenway--all areas where Harvard has existing facilities and ongoing development.

Besides administering programmatic grants to afterschool programs in these communities, Harvard officials said they have also been working to focus University's academic resources toward the initiative.

Through the already-existing Program in Afterschool Education and Research (PAER) which runs through the Graduate School of Education, officials said they plan to work with afterschool programs to improve teacher training and curricula offered.

A inter-faculty group, linking faculty members from a number of Harvard's schools, will research "larger, systemic barriers and solutions to increasing and improving afterschool programs."

PAER will also work with the Harvard Children's Initiative (HCI) and Phillips Brooks House--both programs that already work in the area of afterschool programming--to mobilize volunteers and coordinate training and assessment.

"We wanted to connect all of what we are doing and provide the resources to become more involved," said Lauren Louison, staff director at the Office of Government, Community and Public Affairs.

Harvard Medical School Brazelton Professor of Pediatrics Dr. Judith Palfrey, who directs the HCI, said she thinks the new initiative will be a significant step towards increasing the scope of afterschool programs in the city.

"There have been fabulous small programs all over the place," Palfrey said. "The idea of this partnership is to grow it to scale, and take what we know is good and make it available for a lot more people."

The exact details of how Harvard's initiative, as well as the larger Boston partnership, will be determined through discussions between partners and the community over the next several months after tomorrow's announcement.

"This really marks the beginning of six-month process where we'll do some serious planning," said Kathleen G. Traphagen, director of Boston's 2:00-to-6:00 After-School Initiative, which will coordinate the city's efforts. "The city will be a part of the process, and so will Harvard and the partners."