Grant Benefits Afterschool Programs

With the second installment of Harvard’s $5 million grant to Boston afterschool programs in hand, community leaders and Harvard specialists yesterday kicked off an initiative designed to extend educational opportunities in area schools past the day’s final bell.

The first grant, which awarded $400,000 to 19 Boston-area organizations last January, was funded by the Harvard After-School Initiative (HASI) and organized under the leadership of Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino.

This month’s HASI grant awarded approximately $200,000 to six organizations to create the Harvard Bridging Program. Community centers and academic enrichment programs in Boston are among those who received the award.

The program’s funds and workshops will allow afterschool centers to hire and train education specialists to examine curricula and suggest ways of strengthening the programs’ educational component.

“I don’t think we can do school reform and say it stops at the school doors,” said Associate Professor of Education and Psychology Gil G. Noam, who chairs the program. “The whole point is to strengthen the learning side of afterschool programs without making them like schools.”

The program will also link afterschool programs and encourage cooperation between different organizations.

“We all have different types of afterschool programs, so we need to find out what everybody else is doing how they’re doing it and how we can help each other,” said Thomas A. Regan, the afterschool director at the Jackson Mann Community Center.

Jackson Mann Community Center received $30,000 of the Bridging Program funds for educational staffing.

The program is also expected to reevaluate the role of afterschool staffers as professional educators, according to Noam, who suggested that afterschool work is sometimes unfairly viewed as a temporary stint on a way to a different career.

In addition to Noam, HASI will provide a manager and research assistant to the Bridging Program to help realize the grant’s purpose.

“What’s rare is that you have this combination of grant giving and intellectual and technical assistance component that is done by the same institution,” Noam said.

“It’s kind of a targeted use of the dollars,” said Kevin A. McCluskey ’76, Harvard’s director of community relations for Boston. “Rather than put them out there and have a handshake and take a picture, we are sort of looking to see what the effect will be.”

Noam emphasized that outreach is a crucial component of the program.

“The goal here is to use these funds and the relationship with the community to have a different, more collaborative side of Harvard come to the fore where we solve some problems that are local but that have national impact,” he said.

In addition to funding the Bridging Initiative, Harvard recently granted funds to educate afterschool program staff about responding to mental health concerns in a joint program with McLean Hospital. As much as $230,000 will go to planning and capital improvement grants to after school programs.

—Staff writer Claire A. Pasternack can be reached at cpastern@fas.harvard.edu.