Anna Lytton, Lost Too Young, Still Inspires

Since the death of their teenage daughter, Anna Mirabai Lytton, three years ago, Kate Rabinowitz and Rameshwar Das, a Springs couple, have been working to bring special arts and wellness programs to other youngsters in her name.

The Anna Mirabai Lytton Foundation for Arts and Wellness was started just a week after Anna was struck by a car in East Hampton Village while riding her bicycle to a summer job. Since then, a constant display of flowers and mementos has been maintained on the site, and yesterday, the third anniversary of Anna’s death, a tree and plaque donated by the East Hampton Village Police Benevolent Association was dedicated there.

• Related: Tree Dedicated to Anna Mirabai Lytton 

The foundation has sponsored several pilot programs at the Springs School, from which Anna, 14, had been set to graduate, including yoga classes, a nutrition and cooking class, a poetry bookmaking workshop, field trips for poetry writing and photography sessions, and mindfulness meditation training for teachers.

“It’s really an expansion of people’s love for her,” Ms. Rabinowitz said recently about the foundation. In the loss of her daughter — “of course, I want her back,” Ms. Rabinowitz said — “I want to love all children. I feel like Anna was going to be the kind of person in the world that helped people. She just brought people in; she had an incredible ability.”

So it is fitting, she said, to have a foundation established in her name to offer a variety of programs “that bring out the best in people.” Ms. Rabinowitz is herself a yoga teacher, and Mr. Das has long studied meditation.

“Anna was an avid reader and had begun to explore classic literature on her own,” according to a profile on the foundation website. “She was a prolific writer and poet, and loved to take photographs and listen to music. She loved to cook with her mother and brother, and she and her mom planned to make healthy snacks to sell at the local farmers market.  She had a great interest in health and well-being, loved flowers and gardening with her dad, and going to pick at Quail Hill Farm.”

The foundation’s broad definition of the arts includes all sorts of visual, literary, and performing arts. “Wellness is an integrated view of the many aspects of life that contribute to a healthy lifestyle, to the ormation of a balanced whole human being who functions well in society and has a deep grounding in the spirit,” the website explains.

At a community wellness and yoga night several weeks ago at the Springs School, children and families circulated to stations offering a taste of massage, Reiki, and aromatherapy, and were offered healthy smoothies and snacks. Four different yoga teachers offered mini-sessions of different types of yoga, and at an arts table Megan Chaskey, who had led the Springs eighth graders in a two-week poetry book-making session that culminated in a poetry reading, oversaw the creation of friendship bracelets and mandalas.

Other participants included the Wellness Foundation of East Hampton, the Springs General Store, the organizers of a Yogafest event, and Inda Eaton, a musician who played guitar during the evening. There were screenings of a film on nutrition made by Ms. Eaton and Annemarie McCoy, and of a video of Anna’s appearance, when she was in fourth grade, on a web program called “Smart Girls at the Party,” with Amy Poehler, demonstrating yoga poses she had learned with her mom.

“It was a fabulous community event,” said Ms. Rabinowitz, and was attended by some 200 people, including a number of Anna’s friends, now high school students.

“It was fun seeing whole families there. It just felt like there was a wonderful community spirit there,” said Mr. Das. Similar fairs could be planned for several times a year.

“It’s good to carry on her memory this way,” he said. “It came out of the thought that we wanted to do something for other kids,” he said. “These were the things that she really liked doing the most. It feels like it’s really a way of keeping her going . . . a way of carrying her along.”

It is hoped that the programs will provide models for similar offerings at other schools and community centers — especially important, Mr. Das said recently, because “arts and special programs budgets have been so clobbered” by budgetary restraints. 

With the first couple of years of programming under its belt, the foundation —- with a small core of three board members that includes Irene Tully, a former teacher of Anna’s at the Springs School, along with Anna’s parents — has documented its work in a video.

“Springs has been such a welcoming community,” Mr. Das said. Now, the group hopes “to figure out what works and see if we can replicate it in other situations. I would love to expand to other schools. I’m hoping that this will be a great prototype.”

The interest and willing participation of teachers is key, both he and Ms. Rabinowitz said, and at the Springs School, several became enthusiastic partners in the foundation’s work.

Several teaching units on nutrition have been pulled together, and the creation of teacher guides to the programs is on the foundation’s agenda.

Springs students in kindergarten through eighth grade all got at least six yoga classes sponsored by the foundation during the school year, and in 2015, five East Hampton High School students returned to Springs to design and paint a mural that tied the music and art rooms together. The East End Special Players, a drama group led by Jacqui Leader, participated in cooking sessions at the school, and 30 interested teachers attended an introduction to mindfulness and other social-emotional learning techniques for stress management and focus presented by Liz Slade, a teacher from Larchmont, N.Y., trained by the Inner Resilience Program of New York, who was brought to Springs by the foundation. Discussions are in the works to extend that program into classrooms.

The foundation also underwrote a retreat on Martha’s Vineyard, in a house owned by the Rabinowitz family, for nine teens who had experienced a loss, along with two counselors.

An Anna Mirabai Lytton Foundation financial scholarship is presented annually to a Springs School graduating eighth grader, selected by his or her teachers, who exemplifies a love of learning, helpfulness to others, and a sense of community.

Now that the nonprofit foundation has gotten on its feet, donations will be solicited. They can be sent to the Anna M. Lytton Foundation, P.O. Box 625, Amagansett 11930. They can also be made by naming the foundation as a recipient through the Amazon Smile program. Contributions of art supplies or of time and efforts to facilitate workshops, events, or benefits will also be appreciated, Anna’s parents said.