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Since 1977, Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club has been helping youth from tough Bronx neighborhoods stay out of trouble, stay in school and succeed in life.

Executive Staff and Directors

* Charles Rosen - Executive Director
* Jeff Aulenbach - Deputy Executive Director for Operations & Administration
* Lorraine Corva - Deputy Executive Director for Programs
* John C. Mullen - Chief Financial Officer
* Egeria Bennett - Assistant Executive Director for Youth Programs
* Maria Berrios - Assistant Executive Director for Operations & Administration
* Barbara Bruno - Assistant Executive Director for Senior Programs
* Masani Davis - Assistant Executive Director for Youth Programs
* Glenn Fields - Assistant Executive Director for Youth Programs
* Lynne Mandiola - Assistant Executive Director for Human Resources
* Jose Rodriguez - Assistant Executive Director for Youth Programs
* Lissa Rodriguez - Assistant Executive Director for Youth Programs
* John Curtis - Marketing Director
* Ibis Ozoria - Budget Director
* John Terrero - MIS Director

Board of Directors

* Jeannette Graves - President
* Deloris Barmore - Vice President
* Octavio Cruz - Treasurer
* Hillel J. Valentine - Secretary
* Anna L. Capell
* Leslie Frohberg
* John Roset
* Charles Rosen - Ex-Officio
* Genevieve Tearr
* Novella Thomas

Gloria Wise Brown

Bronx native Gloria Brown Wise devoted her life to social justice and community action.

Ms. Wise attended Bennett College as an undergraduate, a prominent Historically Black College for women in Greensboro, North Carolina. As student body president of Bennett College in 1960, Ms. Wise was the first woman to join the historic Woolworth lunch counter sit-ins—non-violent protests against segregation that helped launch the Civil Rights Movement.

Gloria Wise eventually returned to the Bronx, moving to Co-op City in 1969 as one of the co-op’s original shareholders. She earned a graduate degree in social work from Hunter College, and was employed as a social worker at New York City’s Spofford Juvenile Center.

In 1977 Ms. Wise was recruited by Charles Rosen, a member of Co-op City’s Board of Directors, to found and lead the Youth Activities Committee (YAC), a grass-roots, community based after-school program for children living in Co-op City.
“She created a retinue of people around herself: her church, some of her neighbors, some of her friends, others in the community who were committed to YAC,” recalls Mr. Rosen. “And it was an interesting phenomenon, because she was a black woman in what was then a primarily white community. She really saw all the kids in the program as her own children.”

Ms. Wise remained chairwoman of the YAC until 1984, when she incorporated it as YAC Inc., an independent non-profit organization with herself as executive director. Still working full time as a social worker at a juvenile detention center, she managed YAC in her spare time with no salary. “This was her avocation,” Mr. Rosen says. “Gloria was a hard-working, Christian woman—in the way in which one epitomizes giving, that’s who she was.”

By the early 1990s, Ms. Wise had grown the YAC grew into an organization with a annual budget of $175,000 and was providing after-school tutoring, recreation programs and summer day camp to about 300 children a year at two rented locations in the community.

Ms. Wise learned that she had brain cancer in the fall of 1992, just after she retired from social work to devote herself full-time to her youth organization. She asked Mr. Rosen to take over the organization, and he agreed. The two worked together nearly daily for the next several months, until Ms. Wise’s death in June 1993.

In 1996, the club was renamed Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club in Ms. Wise’s honor. “It was a personal commitment of myself and the board that we would always remember that this is the incredible woman who founded the agency and who ran it for 15 years,” Mr. Rosen says, “nearly 15 years later, her legacy and spirit are alive in our agency.”