Five generations of Fishers have supported the Pressley Ridge youth programs going back to the 1800s, but nothing prior quite matches a $1 million gift the family recently committed to the agency.

In fact, nothing anyone has done for Pressley Ridge rivals the donation, which equals the level of contributions from all other private sources over the past three years, according to agency President B. Scott Finnell.

The North Side-based agency will use the $1 million as seed money to plan a new headquarters and employee training center at a still-to-be-determined location, he said, though its educational, housing and treatment services will continue on Marshall Avenue and at other existing locations.

Lilian Fisher, the former Pressley Ridge board president and family matriarch who has relocated from Squirrel Hill to Naples, Fla., has participated in the nonprofit organization's growth and transformation for half a century. She married into the family that founded Fisher Scientific, and adopted her in-laws' interest in what started as a Pittsburgh orphanage and gradually expanded to an international multi-service provider for troubled children.

"You can't stand still. You either go backward or forward," Mrs. Fisher, 88, said of the family's gift to help Pressley Ridge continue improving. "It's been like my children, watching them grow, helping them keep current to serve the needs of these children."

Dr. Finnell said programming has been in such demand on the North Side campus that space had to be freed up this month by moving administrative offices temporarily to leased property on Corporate Drive in McCandless. The agency plans within five years to develop its own permanent administrative building and training center as part of a project expected to cost at least $8 million.

The scope of Pressley Ridge, in its 175th year, far exceeds the level 50 years ago, when Mrs. Fisher went to the old Waldorf Bakery in Squirrel Hill to get the cake for its 125th anniversary. The organization has 1,200 employees serving 1,700 young people at settings in Pennsylvania, seven other states, the District of Columbia, Portugal and Hungary. It has a budget of about $60 million, mostly through government contracts for its schools, foster care, residential services and other programs for emotionally disturbed and developmentally challenged children.

Mrs. Fisher's late husband, Ben, was in the third generation of Fishers supporting the agency. Their son, Ben Jr., was a board member for 22 years and former president before his death in 2002. Now his widow, Linda, serves on the agency's foundation board, and her daughter is a volunteer for Pressley Ridge. Various segments of the family combined on the $1 million gift, being given in installments over three years.

Before a capital campaign gets under way to follow up on the gift, Dr. Finnell said, the agency will have to decide whether to construct a new building or refurbish an existing one, and whether to do that within the city or in the suburbs.

In the modern communications world, with an array of services offered in children's own homes and many other locations, it's no longer necessary to physically locate the headquarters around the agency's educational-residential buildings on the North Side campus, Dr. Finnell said. The headquarters consists of the staff overseeing finances, human resources, information technology and more for the entire agency, not just in Pittsburgh, where about half of Pressley Ridge's employees work.

The agency is known to the public in large part from its annual late-summer ice cream fund-raiser. It has not concentrated extensively on other fund raising in the past, but will need to do so soon to complete its development plans, Dr. Finnell said.

"Mrs. Fisher was able to see the vision we have now, and happy to get us started," he said.

She and other Fisher family members and past and present board members are expected to take part May 15 in an event at the Duquesne Club commemorating the 175th anniversary.