Inspired to Serve
In part two of our in our video series with Board Chair Juliet Shield-Taylor, she tells us what inspired her to become a member of the Robins board and talks about the importance of “giving while you are living”.
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Growing Up in The Robins Family
In this first of three videos from Juliet Shield-Taylor, Robins Foundation Board Chair and first grandchild of E. Claiborne and Lora M. Robins, she shares memories of her grandparents, their words of wisdom and how she came to write her grandfather’s biography.
Getting Beyond the Buzzword of Inclusion: Local and Global Perspectives
Courtney Rice, Director of Inclusion and Community Impact, co-authored an article for Philanthropy Journal News about diversity, equity and inclusion, and how to move community forward from theory to practice. She addresses how this has worked within our own organization, in particular as it relates to our Community Innovation Grant, which is open for submission now through October 4th. Read more HERE.
Fostering Understanding and Acceptance Through Diverse Perspectives
Robins Foundation is committed to ensuring every student has a fair shot at a successful and empowering education, career and life. So we partner with organizations who support year-round education like Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities (VCIC) who provide workshops for educators and summer retreats for students designed to help eliminate disparities in academic achievement that arise along racial, national origin and socioeconomic lines.
VCIC’s Education Equity Initiative helps train Richmond-area educators and school faculty to provide inclusive and encouraging learning environments for students. Through workshops and retreats, teachers and administrators gain deeper insight into the effects of bias on student performance and opportunities. The VCIC helps them then design curriculum and action plans to close the achievement gap. VCIC’s programs are based on the philosophy that changes in schools must start within the teachers and administrators themselves.
The VCIC also coordinates assemblies, workshops and retreats for middle and high school students to combat prejudice and break down barriers in their own schools. The Harold M. Marsh, Sr. Connections Institute encourages students who have been recognized as leaders among their peers to reflect on their own experiences. Intimate discussions with diverse perspectives foster understanding and acceptance.
Storytelling: Seeing and Believing in our Community’s Youth
In a follow-up to our post last week in support Higher Achievement, we’d like to share a story from a member of their team. Read about how working at Higher Achievement bolstered one person’s community spirit and allowed them to see and believe in the potential of our community’s youth.
Seeing and Believing in our Community’s Youth
Mitchell is one of six children. During the four days a week he is not at Higher Achievement Afterschool Academy he is responsible for his siblings. He is not just the big brother, he is the cook, the disciplinarian, and the bedtime story reader. He is the caretaker for his five younger siblings. When Mitchell is at Higher Achievement, he gets to be a sixth grader. He gets to be a Higher Achievement scholar. He gets to do his homework, play games, build relationships with mentors and eat dinner that someone else cooked for him. He gets to be a kid.
Jason is smart and loves school. He seeks challenging classes and asks for opportunities to learn more. Jason’s mom understood that her child was not being challenged enough at school but is paralyzed with multiple mental disorders and isn’t able to leave her home to take Jason to programs that can provide him with academic opportunities. Jason’s mom learned of Higher Achievement, he excelled in the program and is headed to college next year.
Higher Achievement provides opportunities for middle school students that they would not otherwise have. Opportunity does not look the same for each Higher Achievement scholar and that is why it works. Some scholars need a safe place to spend their evening and summers. Some need a consistent adult in their life. Some need academic help. Some just need to be reminded they are awesome.
Before working at Higher Achievement, I spent the majority of my professional years at an environmental nonprofit. I was comfortable in this arena and accustomed to being the expert in the room. When I moved to Richmond, I was ready to find my next opportunity, and also ready to get out of my comfort zone. Higher Achievement gave me that opportunity. Every day is not always a success and I am definitely not the expert in the room on education, but personal growth doesn’t happen in a comfortable place. Higher Achievement has given me the opportunity to see and believe in the potential of our youth, and that makes me a better person and a better citizen.
School is out. Learning is still in.
Summer break is here, but learning shouldn’t end after the last school bell of the year. This is why Robins Foundations partners with organizations like Higher Achievement in supporting middle schoolers from underserved communities after the school day and during the summer – so they can excel in top-ranked high schools and beyond.
Higher Education recognizes that talent doesn’t always go hand in hand with opportunity. They engage educators, community partners and citizens in mentoring and supporting children with resources during the most critical developmental years. During the summer, Higher Achievement not only continues to tutor students in core areas so they can shine during the next school year, they also enable learning outside of the classroom with weekly field trips and a college visit.
Backed by 40 years of experience and a list of impressive stats and awards, Higher Achievement has a track record of developing engaged, well-prepared students who succeed in school, despite all odds.
As we work toward improving the lives of children and families in Richmond, we’ll continue to work with organizations like Higher Achievement to close the opportunity gap.
Storytelling: Culture and Family Drives Mission
“Each of us comes with life experiences that help to frame who we are, and more importantly who we can be.”
–Robert Bolling, CEO of ChildSavers
Robert takes us on his journey through the experiences that drive his passion for his work – from the example set by his parents during his childhood and the challenges of raising his adopted twins, to continually looking for ways to “deliver the mission” to families whose access to life-changing resources are far more limited than his.
Culture and Family Drives Mission
Soon I will enter my seventh decade of life. I am thinking a lot about legacy. What will I leave for the future of our community’s children’s? Well this story is one outline of my gift. It hovers around three years: 2012, 1958 and 1996.
I stared out my office window on a warm sunny November day in 2012. Less than one month after becoming Chief Executive Officer at ChildSavers, a nearly century-old nonprofit in the Church Hill neighborhood that provides mental health and child development services to vulnerable children. The grass on the back lawn remained green although the flowers and foliage had started to brown, some falling to the ground. Smelling the aroma of the black coffee warming my hands, I called my bride. Three rings and then the pick up:
“I am here for mission, believe me”, I say.
“I know Honey, but what’s wrong?”, she replies.
“Nothing. I am looking out my window at the downtown skyline, one of the best views in the city. And more, I work at a place full of a variety of beautiful paintings – a true art gallery. What could be better?
But I absolutely came here for mission!”, I smiled.
It’s now 1958. David Allen Bolling, Sr. and Evelyn Natalie Jones Bolling, parents of three young boys ages seven, six and four with another in the oven decided to search for a permanent home away from the Jackson Ward community decimated by the construction of Interstate 95.
By my birth, my parents had found the house that I would eventually grow up in Church Hill. We moved in on May 30, thirty days into my young life. We were the third Black family on the block and within a year the community was nearly entirely Black. Surely my block had reached that milestone.
My parents went on to raise five boys and one girl (the youngest and as she says today “not the baby”) in this home. Mom and Dad made life better for us. Books, intellectual challenges, scouts, church and family – nuclear and extended – were steadfast.
My father was a certified nursing assistant at the Veterans’ Hospital located about seven miles from our home. He reported to work daily for the 7:30 am shift. We had no car, so most mornings he walked. He often made the return trip to be home by dinner at 6:00 pm. He did this for most of his thirty-seven-year career.
My mother worked inside the home until all the kids were adults, except on occasion when the family was cash-strapped. The local bakery at Miller & Rhoads department store, day work helped provide the extra income. This proud woman was active in the PTA and education and civil rights causes for most of my childhood. Well-read and a superb debater, in another time she could have easily become a lawyer. Later in life she got an associate degree and had a career at the IRS.
These hardworking, loving parents were my example.
Shift to 1996. My wife and I start our family with the adoption of five-year-old twins. Beautiful children who completed us. Yet with all this joy came buried secrets from a past life for our children – neglect, abuse, family mental illnesses, detachment, and witness to deplorable things that no child should see or experience. Much of this was not initially apparent to us even though we had months of training and insights during the adoption process.
By age 15, my “daddy’s girl” started to change. The difference was incremental at first. She lost interest in favorites, school and sports. Neglecting to wash or groom. Discovering cigarettes hidden under the mattress with phones that we did not purchase coupled with large sums of money we had not given.
This escalated to running away and being returned by police; running again, sometimes gone for days or weeks. Then, the night. She became like the character from the movie, The Exorcist. We hospitalized her, followed by trial and error with therapists. Over the course of the next five years, this pattern happened countless times. At one juncture she disappeared for two years.
Today life for her and for our family is much better. Our daughter is a proud mother of two of our grandchildren. Her twin, our son, watched all this transpire, and once asked, “What happened to my sister?” He too had challenges before graduating from college and becoming a father to our first grandchild, now an autistic five-year-old.
What I learned is that each of us comes with life experiences that help to frame who we are, and more importantly who we can be. Our daughter once told me that, we, her parents, were traditional and that she was different. She liked to experience life even when the consequences were adverse. Eye-opening, and profound. From that I learned to find the ‘good’ attributes and to celebrate the opportunities to grow.
These experiences drove me to ChildSavers, and still drive my passion for our work. My family had resources to eventually find the supports and services for our children and grandchildren. For those families served by ChildSavers, resources are far more limited. So I look out that window and find ways to deliver mission while enjoying the view and the artwork.
Separating Fact From Fiction on Philanthropy’s Role in School Funding
We must clarify the role of philanthropy and the Robins Foundation in supporting local public schools and government services.
The mission of the Robins Foundation is to lead transformational change in the greater Richmond community by listening, learning, and engaging through innovative philanthropy that inspires solutions to society’s greatest challenges. Specifically, we focus on the birth-to-postsecondary education continuum, knowing that education above all can unlock an individual’s fullest potential. Robins supports Richmond Public Schools (RPS) and surrounding school divisions through six-figure strategic partnership grants, by funding the City-led expansion of high-quality afterschool programming, and by supporting a vibrant nonprofit sector that offers critical services to students both during and outside of the school day.
Richmond’s public schools, as Superintendent Kamras and Mayor Stoney have detailed at length, have been chronically underfunded at the state and local level by tens of millions of dollars, year after year, decade after decade. Research suggests that providing an excellent education that meets the needs of our student population would require, in an ideal world, at least double the per-pupil expenditures currently issued. Robins provides grants totaling roughly $6 million a year. If the Robins Foundation did nothing every year but transfer that money to the RPS bank account, their approximately $300 million operating budget would still face at least a double-digit gap and schools would remain in desperate need of additional financial support to provide a high-quality education to every student. As the conversation continues in Richmond around the Mayor’s budget proposal, one thing should be clear: neither Robins Foundation nor philanthropy writ large has the funding capacity to stand in the gap.
Even if this region’s funders did have the capacity, it would be inappropriate for philanthropy to supplant government as the primary funder of public schools, roads, or any other government service. Taxpayer dollars support these public goods because they belong to and benefit all of us. This is why we have elections to put into place democratically accountable leaders to oversee those dollars. There are reasonable arguments against tax increases but expecting philanthropy to step in when elected representatives fail to meet our community’s needs allows both taxpayers and leaders to abdicate responsibility.
At their best, philanthropy and government work hand in hand. Government provides the vehicle for progress while philanthropy provides the booster fuel for innovation and ancillary services. Philanthropy cannot, and should not, displace government, and those who would point to philanthropic dollars as a reason to not support tax increases are relying on a myth.
We are community partners. We invest in this community and its people. We look forward to continuing our support of city and school division leaders as they consider the courageous choices needed to fully fund our schools and lift up our students, teachers, and community.
The Sale of the Lora M. Robins Family Learning Center to VCUHSA has been finalized
The sale of the Lora M. Robins Family Learning Center (LMRFLC) to Virginia Commonwealth University Health System Authority (VCUHSA) has been finalized. The childcare center at LMRFLC which has been operated by VCUHSA since 2010 will continue to operate under the new ownership.
In support of our commitment to children and families in Richmond’s Northside, we plan to invest proceeds from the sale to support organizations and programs in the Northside and throughout the region that align with the community needs and assets identified in our Northside Report (Portrait of Vulnerable Families & Community Needs in Richmond’s Northside). This report highlights the importance of creating safe and enriching spaces for children and families, investing in accessible quality early child development services, and connecting families to jobs that have the promise of a family-sustaining wage.
This sale provides the opportunity for us to make an impact investment so that we can continue advancing innovations and initiatives that benefit children and families in the Northside community. Our founders’ vision was to collaborate and engage with others working to nurture a greater, stronger Richmond for all. We will continue to build on this vision.
Throughout our exploration for transitioning ownership of the building, the priority was to find a buyer capable of and committed to increasing the impact of the facility on children and families in the Northside. We have been working closely with VCUHSA throughout the pre-sale period to ensure that, as the new owner, they will uphold the commitments we have made to this community.
Robins Foundation was established in 1957 by E. Claiborne Robins and Lora M. Robins. Our vision is to advance the greater Richmond community through strategic partnerships, collaborations and education, all of which will serve as a model for creating an environment of fairness and opportunity for everyone to thrive. To achieve this vision, we continue to conduct and support initiatives that encourage policy shifts, align with peers and nonprofits around community issues, and make investments that cultivate and support innovative solutions.
Update on the Lora M. Robins Family Learning Center
Robins Foundation announces the pending sale of the Lora M. Robins Family Learning Center (LMRFLC). We plan to reinvest proceeds from the sale to innovations and initiatives that positively impact Northside communities and align with our vision and mission.
We remain committed to children and families in Richmond’s Northside and will continue to invest in and support organizations and programs that align with the community needs and assets identified in our report, Portrait of Vulnerable Families & Community Needs in Richmond’s Northside.
Partnership for Families (PFF), which was launched along with the LMRFLC in order to support children families in Northside neighborhoods, has announced that they will transition to a temporary location upon closing of the sale, and are working to secure their new permanent location.
We expect to continue working with PFF as they too adapt their service delivery model to work more closely with families in the neighborhoods they serve.
“Throughout this process, we have ensured that the future owner upholds the commitments we made to provide quality childcare and school readiness in the community,” said Kelly Chopus, the foundation’s president and CEO. “The new owner is capable of and prepared to do that. They will continue to provide access to affordable, high-quality childcare for children of the community.”
We anticipate a closing for the sale of the LMRFLC by late spring, 2019.