Michelle Seligson Receives Excellence in Leadership Award
March 12, 2008
Michelle Seligson, former director of the National Institute on Out-of-School Time at the Wellesley Centers for Women, received the inaugural Excellence in Leadership Award from the School-Age Notes Foundation (SANF) March 12, 2008 during the National Associations of AfterSchool Association’s (NAA) annual conference in
In announcing the award, the SANF noted, “Long before any other group was interested in the afterschool child care problem, Michelle and her co-director, Jim Levine, founded the first national research and technical assistance organization in the United States, the School Age Child Care Project (SACCP) at Wellesley Centers for Women, Wellesley College. Michelle had the vision, foresight and leadership to tackle a social issue that was too often hidden from the research and policy agenda. Now, three decades later, the National Institute on Out-of-School (formally SACCP) continues to stand as one of the leading national research, advocacy and technical assistance organizations in the field of afterschool.”
It seems fitting that the first recipient of the School-Age Notes Foundation Excellence in Leadership Award be Michelle Seligson, whose lifetime career has created a long-lasting legacy of what children’s out-of-school time experiences could be. Throughout her illustrious career she has achieved so much and inspired so many. She has established a field of study and codified it through research and writing. She cultivated relationships with leaders across many fields and supported the development of new leaders in school-age care.”
The award was presented to Seligson during the opening session of the conference during which Seligson received several standing ovations from the more than 2,000 attendees in acknowledgement of her significant contributions to the field of afterschool programming.
Through the leadership of Seligson and her colleagues, NIOST has successfully brought national attention to the importance of children's out-of-school time. Through research, training, evaluation, and program development, NIOST has continued to be at the forefront of advances in the field, and has acted as a leader in many areas of out-of-school time policy development, increased quality standards, professional recognition, and community action. NIOST is one of more than 50 individual research, education, and action projects at the Wellesley Centers for Women addressing critical areas in the lives of women, children, and families.
