By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Princeton University will sever its formal legal affiliation with and control over the Princeton-Blairstown Center, a more than 100-year-old charity that serves inner city youth.
Since 1995, the center had been classified as a support organization of the Ivy League school an arrangement that meant the center’s roughly 20-member full-time staff technically were university employees leased out to the center and that the university appointed the majority of the nonprofit’s governing board.
Come this July, that relationship will end by mutual agreement, said University Vice President and Secretary Robert K. Durkee in a phone interview.
Though Mr. Durkee said the university supports the organization’s work, he felt it was not meeting the requirements of a supporting organization of the university’s mission. He noted there were fewer and fewer Princeton students volunteering to work at the camp than there had in the past.
”Our students have other interests these days,” he said.
The university will continue to provide Blairstown with office space and the Princeton University Investment Company still will manage the center’s endowment, Mr. Durkee said.
That endowment is around $20 million to $24 million, said the Rev. Frederick Borsch, an honorary trustee of the center.
The center traces its roots to 1908, when university students took youth from New Jersey and Philadelphia for summer camp. The center, which has a 263-acre campground in Hardwick Township, has evolved over the years and expanded its mission to work with children in inner-city schools in New Jersey and New York.
According to the university, the center served around 4,000 youth last year by working with children between the ages of 11 and 17 in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Washington D.C. The population groups include youth in the criminal justice system, homeless and public and independent schools.

