The Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) held an auction last night to benefit its Summer Urban Programs. PBHA must raise $600,000 by June in order to be able to run its summer program for disadvantaged inner-city children this summer.

Supporters of the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) had the opportunity to bid on Red Sox-Yankees game tickets and a sightseeing trip with singer-songwriter Livingston Taylor at an auction held last night for the Summer Urban Program (SUP).

Four tickets to become “honorary Red Sox for a day” sold for $1,050 to benefit the SUP-affiliated Keylatch camp while the Livingston Taylor trip went for $400.

Yesterday’s auction is only a small part of the effort by SUP directors to plan for a collection of 12 student-run camps that will accommodate about 850 children in low-income Boston neighborhoods.

“[O]ne day we might spend two hours writing a grant and two hours in a meeting, and the next day you might spend 10 hours interviewing, e-mailing, finishing that grant and two hours on the phone with parents,” David V. Jenkins ’03-’05, director of the Mission Hill Summer Program, writes in an e-mail.

And the directors are not the only ones who have to work hard. Altogether, SUP hires 80 to 85 undergraduates, mostly from Harvard, as senior counselors and hires as many high school students to fill junior counselor spots.

And because SUP is the most expensive PBHA-run program—costing an estimated $600,000—funding the camps is a yearly struggle. This year, SUP directors are trying to move away from relying on grants, and are instead focusing on raising money by themselves with fundraisers like yesterday’s auction.

BREAKING THE PIGGYBANK

Mostly located in the communities of Dorchester, Chinatown, Roxbury, and the South End, the SUP camps draw on college students to fill senior counselor positions while local high school students are hired as junior counselors. Most of the senior counselors, who receive two weeks of teaching training, have already been chosen while SUP directors will continue to hire junior counselors until early May.

“The JCs [junior counselors] are so much more important than teacher’s assistants,” director of the Roxbury Youth Initiative Samuel U. Takvorian ’06 says, explaining how these counselors—often from area high schools—strengthen bonds with a community.

And once hired, senior and junior counselors work together with directors to arrange the details of the summer camps’ daily operations.  

“Between now and July 5th, we will get down on paper and in our heads what each minute of each day will look like—knowing of course that with 80 children, even more parents, and 22 staff members, everyone of those planned minutes may change,” Jenkins writes in an e-mail.

While the curriculum can be tweaked until the last moment, raising enough money to fund SUP must be done by June.

Summer program directors say that each year fundraising is the most difficult part of their planning process.

Overall, SUP costs just under $600,000, including the fees involved in running the individual camps and the overhead costs.

“Running a ‘bare bones’ SUP camp requires at least a $40,000 budget. My co-director and I have to raise all of that (with some help from PBHA) ourselves by June,” Diane M. A. Nguyen ’05, one of the directors of the Chinatown Adventure camp, writes in an e-mail.