Venture Philanthropy Partners (VPP) has entered into an investment partnership with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Washington (BGCGW), a multi-service youth organization providing after-school academic enrichment and athletic activities to 35,000 children throughout the National Capital Region.

For over 117 years, BGCGW has been making a positive difference in the lives of area youth, helping boys and girls of all backgrounds, with an emphasis on "at-risk" youth, build confidence, develop character, and acquire the needed skills to become productive, civic-minded, and responsible adults.

The organization provides a range of services in character and leadership development, education and career development, the cultural arts, health and life skills, and sports, fitness, and recreation. The Boys and Girls Club model has a strong track record and demonstrated ability to achieve positive outcomes to improve the lives of youth.

Through this investment partnership, VPP will provide up to $400,000 in funding and strategic assistance, which will enable BGCGW to engage leading experts in the fields of strategic planning, outcomes design, and finance to help them develop a comprehensive, multi-year business plan. This plan will guide BGCGW toward achievement of their aspirations to serve an additional 15,000 youth in the region and become a national model for effectively delivering well-designed programs to culturally diverse youth, providing them the opportunity to "realize their full potential as productive, responsible, and caring citizens." This business planning process, which is the first major activity of our investment partnership, will commence later this month and is expected to wrap up by December, 2004.

BGCGW has very strong leadership in its President and CEO, Pat Shannon, who is highly regarded in the community for her commitment, strength, and effective leadership. Since Pat joined the organization in 1995, the number of children served has grown from 15,000 to 35,000. Last year, she navigated a successful merger with the Metropolitan Police Boys & Girls Clubs, expanding BGCGW to encompass 25 clubs and a 168-acre camp, making it the largest affiliate of Boys & Girls Clubs of America. In addition, the organization has an impressive board of directors, chaired by Bill Eacho.

The merger has created a catalyst and urgency for change that, when combined with the organization's demonstrated performance, community support, and strong leadership and board, represents a remarkable opportunity for this investment partnership. We believe this partnership has the potential to improve the lives of thousands more children, and we are excited to work with Pat Shannon, Bill Eacho, and the rest of the board, as well as the dedicated management team and staff of BGCGW.

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Calvary Negotiates Bond Deal

The DC Revenue Bond Program recently closed its 100th deal. VPP investment partner Calvary Bilingual Multicultural Learning Center is the recipient. The bond deal, which is funded through the sale of tax-exempt municipal bonds, will finance $3.5 million in upgrades and additions at Calvary.

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Other community supporters in attendance included Mayor Anthony Williams, Sandy Dang of AALEAD, Sandy Jibrell of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Rita Harmon of Fight for Children, Liz Reisner of Policy Studies Associates, Julie Rogers of the Meyer Foundation, and Tom Wells, DCPS Board of Education.

LAYC Executive Director Lori Kaplan said, “The evening was a wonderful time to value and appreciate LAYC’s past 30 years while looking toward the next 30 years. The VPP strategic plan has provided the blueprint for our future success for years to come!”

See Forever
On Friday, May 7, See Forever/Maya Angelou Public Charter School will host its seventh annual “Cooking Up a Future” event, featuring food prepared and served by young chefs from the school. Dr. Maya Angelou hosts the event again this year, which will also highlight student artwork, performances, and writings. For more information, please visit the See Forever website, or contact Adriana Rodriguez at arodriguez@seeforever.org or 202-797-8250, ext 23.

Child and Family Network Centers
Also on Friday, May 7, the Child and Family Network Centers (CFNC) has its annual wine-tasting, An Evening in the Vineyards. The event will be held at the American Horticultural Society’s historic, riverside Alexandria headquarters and features wine tastings and hors d’oeuvres, as well as a chance to bid in a silent auction. For more information, contact Jeanne Kersting at jkersting@cfnc-online.org or 703-836-0214.

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Theirs is the stuff that novels and movies are made of. William Melton and Patricia Smith Melton are a renaissance couple of sorts, combining their expansive interests and talents to build new networks they hope will influence the world.

The couple became close friends while attending Westmar College, a small school in Iowa. They graduated and went their separate ways. Bill traveled extensively in the Far East before settling in Hawaii where he started several technology enterprises. Patricia lived primarily in Washington, DC, with seven years in a valley in Tennessee. She became a photographer, a playwright, and a broker of vintage quilts. They each married, raised children, and divorced.

Thirteen years ago, they reunited. They live in a modern English Tudor home on a hillside outside Vienna, VA, filled with handsome art from around the world. And they have built a relationship based on mutual admiration and common goals.

Bill, the son of a Nebraska preacher, studied psychology as an undergraduate and earned a graduate degree in Asian studies. He spent five years working in Vietnam and Taiwan and “being a young bum in Asia.” His Asian connections served him well in providing a manufacturing base for the telecommunications enterprises he started, including Verifone, the point-of-sale credit verification terminals used in most businesses today. He moved to Washington, DC, in 1986 to represent Verifone, which went public in 1991, and positioned himself to invest in a number of enterprises including Transaction Network Systems and AOL. In 1995 he started CyberCash, which created the back-end technology for commerce over the Internet. He sold that business to Verisign, became a quiet investor in other enterprises, and now sits on the boards of more than a dozen companies.

Bill met VPP’s Mario Morino through The Capital Investors and was intrigued by the mission of the then new philanthropic organization. “I thought inner-city crises were in great need of attention and care, but I didn’t have the time or expertise to focus on those issues…(VPP) was a wholesale way for me to provide support.” Recently, Bill visited Heads Up with fellow investor Jack Davies and hopes to get to know other VPP investment partners as well.

While Bill was building enterprises here and abroad, Patricia pursued a variety of careers. She was a writer and photographer for the War on Poverty of the Office of Economic Opportunity and also taught photography for the Smithsonian Associates Program. She has written and produced several plays, and her personal quilt collection is currently on a US tour with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibitions.

In 1991, soon after they married, Bill and Patricia co-founded The Melton Educational Foundation, an international program designed to bring together college students from diverse corners of the world to learn with and about each other. Bill says the program was prompted by the collapse of the Berlin Wall. “I knew how transformative it was for young people to be involved in cultural exchange.” Five universities—in the US, China, Chile, India, and Germany—select five new fellows each year for a total of 80-90 active Melton Fellows at any time. The students communicate year-round via the Internet and have an annual week-long symposium at one of the host universities. To date, nearly 250 students have been through the program.

The Meltons explain that one of the goals of the program is to bring together students from cultures that are undergoing rapid change. The participating school in the US is Dillard University, a respected, historically black college in New Orleans. The Meltons believe the experience has been enlightening and transformative for all of the students.

A second international incident prompted the creation of another Melton foundation. Patricia says that a few days after September 11, “I woke up and realized I needed to bring together a circle of women to figure out how women can be empowered to make peace happen.” She started contacting people she didn’t know to assemble a nucleus of women from around the globe who could frame the issues and opportunities for peace. A few months later PEACE X PEACE was born.

“We define peace as more than the absence of violence,” says Patricia. “It must have substance—education, inclusion of everyone, financial equity, restorative (rather than retributive) justice, freedom of speech, and integrity in media.” She believes women are more inclined than men to befriend and support one another and are influenced by the need to create safe nurturing environments for their children. Women and children also have a tremendous stake in peace because they are by far the greatest casualties of war.

The PEACE X PEACE (“peace by peace”) Global Network uses the Internet to connect circles of women in the U.S., one-to-one, with circles of women outside the US, providing the technology and translation services to enable these women to exchange information, educate, and support each other. Last month, for example, a group of women in California held a benefit that provided funding for a day-long Women’s Competitive Sports Day organized by their “Sister Circle” in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Patricia hopes to raise funds to enable women in developing and war-torn countries to access the Web at cybercafés or rent computer time from local nonprofits in order to be in the Global Network. On June 11, 2004, PBS stations around the country will have a primetime airing of Peace by Peace: Women on the Frontlines, a documentary produced and directed by Patricia that highlights women in five nations engaged in the dangerous work of building peace and democracy. Patricia will spend much of this year promoting the documentary and raising the funds to extend the PEACE X PEACE Global Network, especially connecting women in the US with women in Muslim nations. “If you want peace, you have to invest in the commodities of peace—women. The work women do has not been recognized as the primary force in healing and reweaving cultures,” she says.

Bill, who is an advisor to PEACE X PEACE says that “what Patricia is doing follows the path we’ve often talked about in evolving technology—the creation of a global village.”

Together, they are trying to make that happen.

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WSF will disseminate information about the scholarships to all eligible families in the District of Columbia. WSF will work as the lead organization in a partnership with other local nonprofit groups, including Capital Partners for Education, DC Parents for School Choice, the Greater Washington Urban League, and the Parent Group.

"Our organization was founded just over a decade ago with the goal of expanding educational opportunities for District students. The new DC scholarship program perfectly aligns with our mission to enable families to have greater choice in where they send their children to elementary, middle, and high school," said Joseph E. Robert, Jr., chairman of the WSF Board of Trustees and a VPP investor. "We are gratified to be making this progress toward our ultimate goal, to help all DC students—public, charter, and private—get an education that is unsurpassed by what is available anywhere in the nation."

"The WSF staff, board, and our team of volunteer parents are eager and excited to get started on the scholarship program, and tremendously gratified by this vote of confidence from Secretary Paige and Mayor Williams," Sally Sachar, President and CEO of the Washington Scholarship Fund, said today. "I know our partners are equally dedicated to doing everything in our power to make this program a success for the families who apply for scholarships, the students who receive them, and the private schools throughout our community that enroll students."

The DC scholarship program was created through the federal DC School Choice Incentive Act of 2003, passed by Congress in January. It is part of the Three Sector Initiative, through which the federal government will provide not only scholarship funds during the coming school year, but also some $26 million to improve educational opportunities in DC public schools and public charter schools.

The Washington Scholarship Fund is currently the largest and oldest grantor of privately funded scholarships for K-12 students in Washington, DC. It was founded by a group of local business and community leaders to give low-income families expanded opportunities to choose schools and is governed by a board, the majority of whose members are residents of the District of Columbia.

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