The Highlights Foundation is now Boyds Mills

Alexandra Villasante, author of Fireblooms (Nancy Paulsen Books), joins Matthew to talk about paying for our words.

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Celebrating the power of storytelling to reflect our world, expand our perspectives, and foster connections between readers of all ages. The Children's Book Podcast features interviews with authors, illustrators, and everyone involved in taking a book from drawing board to bookshelf. Hosted by Matthew C. Winner, a teacher, librarian, writer, and fan of kids. Brought to you in partnership with the Boyds Mills, positively impacting kids by amplifying the voices of storytellers who inform, educate, and inspire children to become their best selves.

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Learn more about Boyds Mills and their upcoming programs by visiting www.boydsmills.org.

Transcript:

NOTE: Transcript created by Descript. I've attempted to clean up any typos, grammatical errors, and formatting errors where possible.

Matthew: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the Children’s Book Podcast, where we celebrate the power of storytelling to reflect our world, expand our perspectives, and foster connections between readers of all ages. 

I’m your host, Matthew Winner—teacher, librarian, writer, and a fan of kids.

Today, I’m joined by George Brown, executive director of the Highlights Foundation, with an important announcement. 

Let’s get right to it. 

George: Hi, my name is George Brown. I'm the Executive Director at the Highlights Foundation. 

Matthew: George, welcome. Can I please ask, what is giving you hope today? Yeah. When I think about what's giving me hope today I think about those storytellers who come here to the Highlights foundation, visit us in Boyds Mills at our retreat center, and the stories that they [00:01:00] are dreaming of and creating to bring a little optimism and joy to the world for children.

Yeah, I think it's a great thing to have that hope. And I'm, yeah. I'm a little envious of you to be able to carry that. That's a beautiful thing. George, you're joining me today because you have big news to share. 

George: Matthew, we do real big news. Yeah. In 2026, here we are. We're changing our name from the highlights foundation to Boyds Mills, and for those of us who know us, especially those who have visited us here in Boyds Mills at our retreat center.

Perhaps that name will resonate and make some sense, for sure. 

Matthew: Yeah. Is it Boyd Mills, simply? Or the Boyd Mills Foundation? What happens to the Highlights Foundation? 

George: Sure it, it's Boyd Mills plain and simple and we spent a lot of time thinking it through and what makes sense. Boyd mills.org is an easy website to [00:02:00] remember.

Turns out there are not any other Boyd Mills. Out there in the world. The one just funny little note is there are no apostrophes in the naming of Boyd's mills the way the historical spelling of it is. But this is a geographical place where we have been delivering our programs. Nurturing storytellers.

Our mission is to positively impact children by amplifying the voices of storytellers. We do that here in Boyd Mills as well as online. But when we think about that what it means to us, it's that name. And yeah and there's no, no use of the word foundation. That was part of the conversation.

Two pieces of the name change one highlights and kind of the confusion we sometimes get of being confused with the magazine. We are very much a. Part of that highlights mission, and we have that shared belief that children are the world's most important people. But over time we've come to recognize highlights has, its audience and its products of [00:03:00] delivering magazines, books, and experiences directly to children.

And what we do is we nurture storytellers and we're helping storytellers think about creating their stories. And so we've grown up over 40 years as the Highlights Foundation to become our own our own newly named Boyd Mills. So it's been 40 years. Why change your name? Why now? Yeah, so if you go back to those 40 years ago in 1985, my father along with the editors of Highlights magazine, hosted these this first workshop, which would become the highlights foundation.

And that was a week long event. And that was highlights, editorial staff hosting a program right. And so over time, as we've grown we've developed our own staff, we've developed our own programs. We rely less and less on the highlights team for support in those pieces. And we've grown into our own [00:04:00] 

Full fledged literary arts organization serving the entire world of storytellers, interested in creating the very best stories for children. So our offerings, they continue to grow our base of supporters, our faculty, our students continue to grow. And while there may be some halo effect that we lose from the name highlights, oh, I know highlights.

I think it also opens us to some new opportunities as there's less confusion in the work that we do and the work that highlights that does to deliver their products. We continue, we are the home of the founders of highlights. We continue to have a strong relationship with the company.

Matthew:  We have that shared belief that children are the world's most important people. But this name helps clarify for us that we have different audiences and delivery methods. To support that belief that children are the world's most important people. Were there a number of different names? Did you feel clarity maybe, is what I'm asking?

George: When it came to deciding [00:05:00] Boyd's Mills. Yeah. And so when you look back, like today, this is a big announcement 'cause we're making this public. But as we look back, this is five years in the making and then we've spent the last year thinking about it. And then the last six months we've really been intentional about it.

And you're right, Matthew, we. We came up with all sorts of names and talked about a number of names and ideas and we kept coming back to this idea of what makes us special and it's the place. Of our retreat center here in Boyds Mills. That really makes us special. This is my family's homestead.

This is where my great grandparents started. Highlights Magazine. There's a magic here. And this physical space in this rural community in Pennsylvania, northeast Pennsylvania. We're in the middle of nowhere. Even though we're a couple of hours from everything, right? It doesn't take long to get into New York, Philadelphia.

Even down in the DC area, I was just there. It's about a five hour ride. But this nurturing [00:06:00] that happens at the retreat center, that's what our brand essence has become. It feels a little bit like home and it creates that comfortable feeling. You're home, away from home perhaps. I think as we thought it through and we came up with different names, nothing felt quite as right as Boyd Mills. And it, it did become an obvious choice. The more we talked about that. 

Matthew: With this name shift, are things changing? It sounds like you're keeping the same mission. Are things staying the same?

George: No it's fascinating. This is literally just a name change. Everything else stays the same. Our board of trustees, our staff, our programs, we're well known for our summer camp programs, our whole novel workshops. We have a number of genre based programs nonfiction poetry, picture books, novels, and verse our custom retreats, our community retreats.

All of those [00:07:00] pieces, our scholarship program, which is so important to us, all of those pieces continue and continue to be the same. It's really just a reframing with a new name.

Matthew:  That's terrific. I really have come to admire and love and celebrate your in-community retreats. I feel like that's what feels synonymous for me with Boyd's Mills and what has in the past felt synonymous with highlights.

So it's great to know that you're bringing your past with you. What's coming next for Boyd Mills?

George: That's a great question. I think we're, we've got a full schedule for 2026, and if you check out Boyd mills.org, you'll see the programs and the offerings. We have a number of retreats happening on campus as well as our online programming.

And the online we have two different tracks there. We have our minis, which are quick. Two nights you're in, you get to your content and you go. And then we have some of our longer [00:08:00] form workshops, which are more like a four to six week commitment. But we have some of those some beginner friendly courses like diving into your novels, diving into your picture books the crash course and children's publishing.

And then we have some of the more longer form content workshops happening as well. This sounds terrific, George, and congratulations on the name change and for 40 years of really helping to bring more stories to the children that we all seek to serve, or that I am blessed to be able to serve each day.

Matthew: I would love to close our time together just by asking simply, what are you most excited about? 

George: Yeah, Matthew. I think what I'm most excited about is thinking about how we're positioning ourselves for the next 40 years. Like it's a big deal to be 40 years old as a nonprofit, right? As a nonprofit. Our job is to talk about the impact of our work and [00:09:00] to think about what we do.

We exist for some good cause, and our impact is talking about positively impacting children, and that takes a long time when your work is nurturing storytellers. The writing process, the publishing process, it can be long. And so we understand the length it takes for storytellers to create stories, but we understand the value of that impact.

So I think what I'm most excited about is just thinking about how we continue to deliver on that mess, that message, and that mission, and how we can continue to evolve over the next 40 years to serve storytellers with what they need. And Matthew, I just, I wanted to just shout out one last thing. You approached us a year ago and you said to us, how can I help, can we partner on this podcast?

Matthew: And I just wanna thank you for that. It's really been a great way to get our name out there and to have an association with someone with your reputation [00:10:00] has really been special. So thank you for that. I really appreciate that partnership. The beautiful moment I have had talking to you today is hearing the mission on your lips and knowing it's been on mine as well in the introduction to all of the episodes this past year.

George: It's been quite a pleasure and yeah, I'm looking forward to what the future holds because it's quite an honor for me that you had once described. When I was pitching this idea to you, George, you once described to me that highlights does such a wonderful job of supporting. Writers in the ideation process and the drafting and the editing and the publishing and the school visits.

But beyond that, it's beautiful that I can be a part and be interviewing folks with what does it mean now to have a book out in the world, to see your story being. Having its ownership passed off to the people it was [00:11:00] always intended for to the readers. Yeah. That majority ownership that readers inherit when the book is published is a wonderful thing.

Matthew:  And so I say back to you thanks with great gratitude because it's neat to be able to be part of that, that journey. It really is. Beautiful. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Mutual admiration.

Thank you to George Brown and to the team at Boyds Mills for this partnership and for all of the journeys begun and continuing through Boyds Mills

The Children’s Book podcast is brought to you in partnership with Boyds Mills, positively impacting kids by amplifying the voices of storytellers who inform, educate, and inspire children to become their best selves.