For 25 years, Doreen E. Boyce has led the Buhl Foundation, one of the oldest multipurpose charities in the city. She announced yesterday that she'll step down as president this summer.

In her time at the 79-year-old foundation, Dr. Boyce invested and leveraged more than $100 million in grants and philanthropy to improve the region.

She supported the effort to introduce information technology to libraries, beginning with colleges and then spreading to the public libraries, effectively putting Internet access at the hands of all library patrons.

She supported the creation of the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership, which since 1994 has promoted Downtown as place to shop, live, work and visit.

The Buhl Foundation gave the grant to help transform the Harris Theatre into the only large-screen cinema Downtown; and established the newly named Buhl Digital Dome at the Carnegie Science Center, which is characterized by its production technology.

"Happily," said Dr. Boyce, "this foundation has no limited mandate. We can do what we want that seems right."

Dr. Boyce, the daughter of a diplomat, was born in Chile and has lived in Europe and Africa.

She earned a degree in development economics from the University of Oxford and she has a doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh.

Her husband is from South Africa, where she taught economics at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. They decided to leave the country with the heightening of apartheid in the 1960s.

The couple came to Pittsburgh in 1962 and she built a career in teaching and administration at Chatham College. After two years at Hood College in Maryland, she came to the Buhl Foundation.

"Having lived in so many countries and gone to school so many places, it helped me to be open-minded and adaptable. What I learned is that people live differently but the core of who we are is the same."

This informed her philanthropy, said Dr. Boyce, because the experiences helped her to be a listener and understand people's circumstances.

"I was interested in economic development," she said. "We saw the crash of the steel industry and wanted to guard against that and make people more self-sufficient."

A believer in science and education, she continued the Buhl's support of technology, especially with the Buhl Science Center.

"I believe Downtown is everybody's neighborhood," she said, "so we worked on bringing Downtown back to life."

Based on the philosophy that its grants should strive not to displace other giving, but rather stimulate it, the Buhl Foundation has supported education, programs for youth, innovation and cooperative programming.

Her work, said Ron Wertz, president of the Hillman Foundation, means we "have a region that is far stronger and better."

Leaving the foundation doesn't mean she's leaving philanthropy. Dr. Boyce will continue her work with nonprofit boards, helping to build good governance.

She plans to stay connected to the changes happening on the Central North Side, which is where Henry Buhl owned a successful business on Federal Street. When he died, in 1927, he left $11 million to establish the Buhl Foundation.

"I sense the North Side is beginning to move. We worked early with Federal North Project [a new housing development] and are excited to see what's beginning to happen with the new library and the mayor's initiative [to rebuild parts of North Avenue]."