Students at a Florida high school raise money and distribute grants at community foundation they run
FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA
On first impression, Rebecca Brogan and her friends resemble the youthful cast of the television show Beverly Hills 90210 more than they do philanthropists.
Driving a silver BMW down roads lined with palm trees, Ms. Brogan, 17, is wearing a stylish plaid miniskirt and is chattering excitedly about the visit of her boyfriend from Boston. In the back seat, Jennifer Whittington, 16, giggles.
But instead of heading for the mall, the two teen-agers are on their way to visit a charity to decide whether they want to support it with money they have raised. Along with nearly 50 of their schoolmates, they are involved in what is believed to be the only community foundation to be founded and run by teen-agers.
Established in 1994, the Pine Crest Community Foundation, named for the private school the teen-agers attend, is like any community foundation: Its leaders raise money and use it to make grants to local charities. To date, $21,000 has been raised.
Pine Crest has been so successful that the Plan for Social Excellence, a private foundation in Mount Kisco, N.Y., that has provided it with $8,000, is trying to spread the idea nationwide. It has produced a video about Pine Crest that it plans to send to 200 schools to encourage them to start similar foundations.
Pine Crest’s supporters say the project has turned out to be an ideal way to teach young people the ropes of raising money and giving it away. What’s more, they say, it is superior to requiring young people to do community service in order to graduate -- an increasingly popular rule at both public and private schools. Proponents of the Pine Crest approach say that teen-agers involved in the foundation must be more responsible than those in community-service efforts and must act as leaders, not just helpers.
Nationwide, a number of efforts are under way to expose young people to the idea of raising money and making grants:
* United Ways in Florida, South Carolina, Texas, and elsewhere have established youth-run fund-raising campaigns. Secondary-school students hold United Way fund-raising events in their classrooms, soliciting classmates to donate spare change or a few dollars, while educating them about local charities.
* For the past eight years, the Council of Michigan Foundations, in Grand Haven, has been using $45million from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and several other foundations to establish “youth endowments.” The youth funds are distributed entirely by young people, and each of the state’s 55 community foundations now has such an endowment.
* Each year since 1992, the Dekko Foundation, in Kendallville, Ind., has given small groups of students from Indiana and Iowa $15,000 each to distribute to charities as they see fit.
While those programs have seen many successes, they were all designed by adults. Pine Crest, on the other hand, was conceived of and established entirely by teen-agers.
The foundation got its start in 1994, soon after Mario Pena, a 1952 graduate of Pine Crest and principal of the school in the 1970s and 80s, gave an acceptance speech after he was named an “outstanding alumnus” of the institution.
Mr. Pe!#*tila, executive director of the Plan for Social Excellence -- an eight-year-old foundation that makes about $900,000 in grants each year for new education projects -- decided to use the stage as a bully pulpit to fire up the young people fanned out before him to help the less fortunate.
“It occurred to me that the students needed to look outside the walls of the school,” recalls Mr. Pena. He challenged the students to raise $4,000 for local charities, and he promised that if they did, his foundation would match that amount.
As Mr. Pena talked, Ms. Brogan, then a freshman, listened intently and vowed to herself “to do more than just raise $4,000, which is not that big a deal. I wanted to create something permanent.”
Ms. Brogan’s inspiration, which evolved into the community foundation, may stem from watching her parents, who have long been active in charity work. Her father, Frank, a lawyer, founded the Broward Community Foundation in Fort Lauderdale and is now chairman of its board; her mother serves as a trustee of many local charities.
During the five months after Mr. Pena’s speech, Ms. Brogan and a small group of peers raised the money to meet his challenge. They sold roses for Valentine’s Day, hawked T-shirts for classmates to wear on dress-down Fridays, and persuaded the student council to give $2,000. Those efforts helped bring in $5,000, and the Plan for Social Excellence provided its promised $4,000.
The teen-agers turned over their money to the student council, which manages most student funds, and had the council invest it in a savings account. To make sure the money is carefully distributed, a faculty adviser must co-sign all checks written by the community foundation.
After the money was raised, Pine Crest students encountered what they say was a tougher challenge: figuring how to give it away.
The teen-agers knew only one thing: They wanted the money to help disadvantaged youngsters.
“The whole premise,” says Ms. Brogan, “is that we feel so lucky to be at a school like Pine Crest. We want to help the kids who are not as lucky.”
The Pine Crest students began by making calls to officials at local youth charities that they had heard about, such as Covenant House Florida and Jack & Jill Nursery. They told the officials -- some of whom were friends of their parents -- that they wanted to meet with them to discuss a possible grant.
“These ladies came in with hope just right out of the blue,” says Fran Payne, executive director of Jack & Jill Nursery.
The unexpected visit could not have been better timed for the nursery, which offers low-cost day care to poor working mothers. Since 1990, it has lost nearly all of its annual support because of federal-, state-, and local-government cutbacks, and has been forced to turn to private donors for support.
Ms. Payne recalls that Ms. Brogan interviewed her for three hours. “She asked, ‘What do you need? Why do you need that? Where does the money go?’ You name it,” Ms. Payne says.
The teen-agers grilled several other charity leaders before making their first round of grants. Covenant House and Jack & Jill Nursery, along with three other youth charities (Make-A-Wish Foundation, Kids in Distress, and the Florence Fuller Child Care Centers) were awarded $1,000 each.
The Pine Crest students told the charity leaders that they trusted them to use the money well, so they placed no restrictions on the grants.
“It’s lovely to think our grant goes to scholarships,” says Ms. Brogan. “But we don’t care if it goes to new light bulbs. Everyone wants the glamour scholarship with their name on it, but we don’t.”
While the decisions the teen-agers make about their grants may be a valuable learning experience, Pine Crest does not consider it to be a substitute for community service. The school requires all of its students to volunteer at least 50 hours before they can graduate.
Mr. Pena of the Plan for Social Excellence hopes that programs modeled on the community-foundation model might eventually replace community-service requirements. He says that he loathes such requirements because “I have umpteen times seen kids try to cram in the 15 hours that they’re supposed to do at the last minute. They try to get out of it. Most of the time they look upon it as forced labor.”
On the other hand, he says, “the community foundation is something that they engage in voluntarily. It gives them the power to engage in the whole process of philanthropy and to learn something about their community because they have to do research. It empowers them because they see themselves as the donors. Forcing them to do volunteer work does not.”
While few educators would disagree with that statement, they say that unless charity work is a graduation requirement, it will not be taken seriously by most young people.
Lourdes Cowgill, headmistress of Pine Crest School since 1988, says she would not swap the school’s community-service requirement for the Pine Crest Community Foundation. She says students involved in the Pine Crest Community Foundation are pupils who have done a lot of volunteer work, and she wonders if they would have been so eager to help the foundation if they had never been involved in charity efforts. “It’s like anything else: How do you know you like skiing if you haven’t skied once? How do you know if you like reading if you haven’t read once?” she says.
Since Pine Crest made its first round of grants, the foundation has raised $12,000 and is now figuring out how to distribute it.
The teen-aged fund raisers have received a lot of help from their peers. The school’s Spanish club donated $500, for example, which it requested be spent on aid for Hispanic children.
Students and teachers in Pine Crest’s lower school, which includes first through sixth grades, decided to dig deep into their discretionary fund, giving the foundation $3,500 to help young hurricane survivors.
Additional support is dribbling in from a schoolwide drive to collect one million pennies (or $10,000 worth). So far, about $200 worth has been collected.
As their money has piled up, the teen-agers have grown more sophisticated in how they spend it. Last year, for example, following a suggestion from Paul Aldridge, their faculty adviser, they created a one-page “Request for Funding” form for grant applicants to fill out, rather than rely on informal conversations.
Paula Tibbetts, public-relations director for Covenant House Florida, says she was impressed when she saw the form, which requires detailed information such as what percentage of the grant will go to helping people whom the charity serves versus what would go to employees’ salaries and other expenses.
“We apply for lots and lots of grants,” says Ms. Tibbetts. “Theirs ranked up there with the most comprehensive.”
Last year, the Pine Crest fund sought to join the Council on Foundations, in the hope that doing so would allow them to learn from seasoned peers. But the council turned down their request. A spokesman for the council said it could not accept the foundation because it is not a free-standing tax-exempt organization, but instead operates legally as a unit of Pine Crest School.
While the Pine Crest Community Foundation’s fund raising and grant making have made significant strides, the fund is still relatively small. It has barely raised as much as two years’ worth of tuition at Pine Crest’s upper school. But charity leaders say the real value of the teen-agers’ work has no dollar value.
Ms. Tibbetts, of Covenant House, says, “These teen-agers are acknowledging that there is a needy peer group out there and that their help can have an impact on them.”
She adds: “You would think, perhaps, with these Pine Crest kids, their expensive private school, that they would be different, not have compassion. But they are delightful.”
Altruistic as the Pine Crest students are, many of them may also obtain personal benefits by participating in the fund. Many hope to use the experience to help them win admission to some of the most prestigious universities in the country.
Ms. Brogan, who cited her role in founding the community foundation in her applications, recently won early admission to Harvard. When she gets to the Cambridge campus she says she plans to start a new community foundation. “Most definitely,” she says. “I think it could be 10 times as successful with college students.”