SCAN NY joins Boys & Girls Harbor to announce a pro-active organizational collaboration to enrich services to East Harlem children and families.
East Harlem, NY – July 16, 2018
Two of East Harlem’s most respected community based youth and family service providers – Boys and Girls Harbor and SCAN (Supportive Children’s Advocacy Network) – have mutually entered into an integration of corporate and programmatic operations effective July 1, 2018. SCAN and the Harbor have long been vital parts of the fabric of the East Harlem community. This collaboration will allow both organizations to continue to provide and grow high-caliber, critical programming to East Harlem young people. SCAN, the largest youth and family service provider in East Harlem, has a forty year history of distinguished El Barrio presence. The Harbor, founded in 1937 by Tony Duke, boasts a more than eighty year record of giving the young women and men of East Harlem an opportunity to be their best. Lew Zuchman, SCAN Executive Director, serves as President of the Human Service Consortium of East Harlem, El Barrio’s largest and longest standing human service networking body.
Steve Dannhauser, Harbor Chairman, noted, “In an effort to ensure that Boys and Girls Harbor’s extraordinary contribution to the lives of children and families in East Harlem could continue and strengthen, the Harbor has been engaged in a vigorous search for an ideal partner. We found in SCAN an organization who shares our abiding commitment to this community and a partner possessing the capacity to provide significant ‘wrap-around’ support services vital to the lives of our Harbor children and families.”
SCAN Board President, Jamel Oeser-Sweat, once a child reared in El Barrio, and, a SCAN participant at ten years of age, as well as, a twelve year SCAN Director, stated, “The synergistic programmatic elements of our Harbor/SCAN partnership are inspiring. We hope to merge together the finest elements of our collective staff, programing, and, Board of Directors to realize an exemplary community based youth and family service model, one to be emulated as a pioneering effort to strengthen service delivery to inner city children and families.”
Lew Zuchman, a fifty year veteran of East Harlem service delivery, notes, “Contigo/Together, SCAN and Harbor will demonstrate the critical import of inner city based organizations ‘coming together’, in these challenging times, to form a more powerful, enduring union of effective service delivery. Too often, organizational mergers are realized as one agency or the other is on life support. This pro-active union of Harbor and SCAN offers the promise and power of two vital East Harlem agencies, uniting together to better serve nuestra comunidad. Harbor with its distinguished Performing Arts Academy, and, educational focus, presents as an ideal partner to merge with SCAN’s vast ‘wrap-around’ youth and family service delivery matrix.”
Effective July 1, 2018, Lew Zuchman will serve as Executive Director of both organizations, as this unique partnership moves toward legal corporate merger. Such a merger serves as a critical beacon of responsible community based management, as not-for-profits struggle to survive and thrive within a most challenging fiscal environment.
Download the full media release here.
For further info contact: Bill Fink, Associate Executive Director for Development and External Affairs
SCAN New York PH (212) 289-8030 ext. 226 bfink@www.scan-harbor.org