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.

“It’s a pretty daunting task and harder than ever this year with the economy as it is,” she continues.

Programs can receive funding from three basic sources: local corporations, who have a vested interest in supporting the camps; grants or foundations; and individual donations from students, friends and parents, according to Takvorian.

And all the camps have to raise $7,000 more this year than they had to last year because they won’t be receiving the grant from Harvard’s Office of Community and Government Affairs.

“That money is being made up through a combination of individual camp fundraising and PBHA central,” PBHA President Kristin M. Garcia ’05 writes in an e-mail, referring to last year’s $7,000 grant. This year, she says, they did not reapply for the grant.

Garcia says while SUP has already received aid from the Stride Rite Corporation—which will match individual gifts up to a total of $1,000 for each camp—this year the program is moving away from relying on outside grants.

“Also, SUP is doing very well financially. We’ve put ourselves in a position to do lots of creative fundraising and though we welcome any support from Harvard, it’s also important to be financially independent,” she says.

Planned fundraising efforts are both camp-specific and SUP-wide. Yesterday’s auction was an example of an SUP-wide fundraising event, as well as a Bowl-a-thon planned for next month. Last night, SUP earned $12,500 through the auction.

Even Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 chipped in, forking over $600 for a week-long dream vacation in Maine.

These earnings, as well as all SUP-wide fundraisers, will pay for shared costs—like counselor training—and be split among the camps “on a per camper basis,” writes Garcia in an e-mail.

“We also distribute money on a need basis for camps, but all of the camps have a team mentality, and realize that they need to put in a lot of effort in order to make the need based distributions fair,” she writes.

SUMMER LOVE

While money may be their temporary top concern, the program directors all say that fostering a sense of community in low-income areas of Boston is what drives them to log 20 to 40 hours a week.

“One of the things that’s really special about the camps is that they’re so community-based,” Garcia says.

Garcia recalls that when she directed the Franklin I-O camp last year, “Franklin Love” was the theme of many camp activities, and this year’s Franklin I-O directors say that “love” is still the best word to describe the camp.

Garcia adds the camp’s history is kept alive by the campers—some of whom are the children of those who attended 20 years ago. They return year after year, Garcia says, and sometimes go on to work as junior counselors, senior counselors or directors.

“The kids know more about the camp than you do when you first go,” Garcia says.

While all of the programs work with local kids, the Mission Hill Summer Program and Chinatown Adventure, or CHAD, are the only two that house counselors in the community.

“It means that for the time we’re working with children in Mission Hill, we’re not just outsiders coming in, but community residents working in solidarity,” Jenkins writes.

Building community occurs between the SUP camps as well. The directors and counselors plan joint field trips, called Operation Together, for camps in communities that historically have had tension between them, Garcia says.

Coming together is also difficult, at times, for the PBHA summer planners. Making sure that all voices are heard is a central aspect of the SUP program, but allowing everyone to take part in the decision-making process is a challenging and time-consuming endeavor, says Jenkins.

“A core value of community service and social work is that everyone involved is an end in themselves—each person’s positive development, happiness, and well-being is essential to the program. That’s why for SUP it’s really important to take into account the voices of everyone involved,” Jenkins writes.

“Since this process is difficult and time-consuming,” he continues, “it can be hard to put those values into practice...but we do.”

—Staff writer Sara E. Polsky can be reached at polsky@fas.harvard.edu.