A letter from President, Treasurer & Director Caroline Williamson

It is hard to believe that 2022 marks the 10th anniversary of Robert’s death and the founding of the B. Robert Williamson Jr. Foundation. Richard and Maureen Chilton provided the initial gift to start the foundation. We hosted the inaugural RW Golf Classic in 2013 and because of the generosity of so many of you, we have been able to build on the initial gift and fundraiser to the point where we have given away $2 million and have plans to give away more!

We began in 2012 by gathering our first grantees – organizations where Robert and I had been involved. As the grantees got to know each other, we tried to come up with a program where they could collaborate to help the under-resourced youth they all served. What evolved was a 3-year training in adaptive leadership, a framework designed to help individuals and organizations confront complex challenges and make the adjustments necessary to thrive in rapidly changing contexts. Say Covid anyone!

Funding for leadership development is standard in the for-profit sector, but rare in the nonprofit sector. Throughout the three years, different teams from the grantees received both individual and group coaching on a specific challenge. Some continued the training beyond that time frame – offering it to other organizations or the youth they served. One leader, Dr. Linda Lousell-Bryant, took the program to NYU’s Silver School of Social Work, where she began integrating it into her master’s level class and offering a fellowship for students to learn the framework more in-depth and incorporate it into their agency placements.

We welcomed our eighth cohort of students for the adaptive leadership fellowship program at NYU in January. The NY Community Trust, a large, prestigious foundation in the city, continued its funding to replicate our program at the College of Staten Island (CSI), CUNY. CSI offers a MSW program with a sole concentration in social work practice for people with disabilities. Dr. Bryant’s adaptive leadership course is now a for-credit course in the master’s program and a required course in the PhD program. The professors there also have founded the Adaptive Leadership in Human Services Institute, where the mission is to address the pressing social challenges of our time, contribute to the efficacy of the leaders’ organizations, and equip them to assume senior management positions in the human services arena.

In addition to the inaugural grantees – Inwood House (now merged with Children’s Village), New Life of New York City, New York Botanical Garden, and PAVE Academy Charter School – we have added several other grantees. These include The Boys and Girls Club of Wake County, Culture for One, Harlem Grown, Hudson River Community Sailing, and the B. Robert Williamson Jr. Scholarships at UNC. In anticipation of increased grant making, we also added Connections Mentor, Inc., Crista Rey New York High School, Fencing in the Park, Horizons at St. David’s, Naked Angels Ltd., and the Red Hook Initiative to our grantee portfolio in 2021.

Let’s take a quick look at the work being done by just two of our grantees. Harlem Grown operates three urban farms, one with a hydroponic green house, in Harlem and is partnering with the New York Housing Authority to add green spaces to several new housing projects. We helped fund its teaching truck that goes out to public schools to teach children how to make healthy meals and donates produce for them to take home. Fencing in the Park began as a summer weekend program for children in Flatbush Brooklyn. It was founded by Nzingha Prescod, an Olympic fencer who benefitted from a fencing program when she was young that allowed her to attend Columbia University on a fencing scholarship. With our support and others, she opened Prescod Institute of Sport, Teamwork and Education (PISTE) and left her consulting job to build the organization and teach fencing along with an Olympic teammate to children four times a week. Nyzingha has also been named to the newly formed Mayor’s Office of Sports. These organizations, along with all of our other amazing grantees, will be highlighted on our website throughout the year, but in the meantime you can learn more about them here https://www.brwjrfoundation.org/empowering-communities.

We are proud of the work our grantees did during the pandemic. They were able to pivot and continue serving their youth in new and different ways, whether it was providing arts workshops or individual lessons via Zoom or providing laptops for online education. Some of our grantees work with children in foster care or group settings and their staff had no option to work/study from home, so maintaining staffing levels became a key issue. We gave additional grants during this period to help support these challenges.

We hope you will join us at the 12th annual RW Golf Classic on Thursday, Sept. 12 at the Rockaway Hunting Club. You can register here https://www.brwjrfoundation.org/connect/events. Thank you again for your past generosity and we hope you will continue to help us support these wonderful organizations.