AN ANTONIO -- One day in March 1997, David Robinson and his wife, Valerie, paid a visit to the Carver Community Cultural Center, the weather-beaten but enduring arts institution on this city's neglected east side. They had been there previously to discuss a donation to the center, which operates on a modest $1.4 million annual budget and was then preparing to open a capital campaign for much-needed renovations.

	Bob Owen for The New York Times
	The Carver Community Cultural Center in San Antonio, to be renovated and joined by a new school in a four-block complex.

"We wanted to create something that would still be here 100 years from now," said Robinson, best known as the center of the San Antonio Spurs, the National Basketball Association champions, who play in the Alamodome, a few blocks from the Carver.

"And we wanted to do something on the east side.

It's a sad neighborhood, and that has always bothered me. It's mostly an African-American neighborhood, and it's right down the street from my arena."

To those ends, the Robinsons made a decision that was remarkable in its magnitude and abruptness. They chose to build a school for neighborhood children on the grounds adjacent to the Carver, with the Carver name.

The school had been a wish of Jo Long, the Carver's longtime director, as an appropriate crown for an institution she has nurtured almost obsessively for 23 years. But it was largely a pipe dream. And in any case she was unprepared for the Robinsons' largesse.

After the March meeting the Robinsons went to lunch, Ms. Long recalled. "And they called me an hour and a half later and said, 'O.K., we're going to give you $5 million for this school.' I was speechless. I got up and came home. And the next day they delivered a check for $75,000 to start the master planning."

In recognition of the gift, on Wednesday Robinson, 34, is to receive the Montblanc de la Culture Award, one of a series of annual honors for philanthropy in the arts bestowed around the world by Montblanc, the German pen makers.

For the Carver, however, and for Ms. Long in particular, the story has a "be careful what you wish for" element as well. The ceremonial groundbreaking is to be held on Monday for a new institution, the Carver Complex, encompassing a $6 million renovation and expansion of the Carver Cultural Center and a 280-student independent elementary school to be known as the Carver Academy, all of which has been set in motion by Robinson's $5 million.

But Ms. Long, 49, who is something of a local legend, will not be there. She is at home recovering from a breakdown, leaving the Carver leaderless at a crucial time. It is uncertain when, or if, she will return.

"I believe the stress of this effort contributed to her disability," said Isaiah T. Creswell, the chairman of the arts center board, known as the Carver Development Board.

It was an assessment with which Ms. Long, who spent a month in the hospital this summer being treated for bipolar disorder, concurred.

It was just after the delivery of the first $75,000, Ms. Long said, that the Carver began acquiring the property for the academy. Six months later as she was being named by Texas Monthly as one of the 20 most influential Texans, the Robinson gift was announced to the public. "That," she said, "was the start of my anxiety."

Bob Owen for The New York Times

David Robinson, a basketball player, is a benefactor of the Carver Community Cultural Center.

The strain on Ms. Long and the Carver has to do with the problem of what happens to a small institution when it faces the kind of change that the Robinson gift has engendered. There is no precedent in the Carver's history for the kind of fund-raising, money management, land acquisition or capital construction required by the new project.

The general situation is complicated by the Carver's idiosyncrasies: its historical significance to San Antonio's black population (less than 8 percent of the city's approximately 1 million people), its current significance to the poor and underserved area where it stands and its unusual relationship to the city government, which finances more than half of its budget through the city's social services arm, the Department of Community Initiatives.

The city would ultimately like to trim its financing of the Carver, but any moves along these lines have been successfully fought by the local community, and Ms. Long, who say the city pays far too little attention to the east side as it is.

The Carver is the east side landmark, a place where the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Paul Robeson performed. It began life in the early part of the century as a segregated library and meeting hall; the current building, erected in 1929, has an inscription over the side door identifying it as the "colored branch" of the San Antonio library.

It served that function until the city was desegregated in the 1960's.

Ms. Long arrived in 1976, just three years after the city, to neighborhood outrage, threatened to demolish the building. (One woman actually lay down in front of the bulldozers.) Under her guidance the Carver has presented, mostly in its 650-seat, poorly ventilated auditorium, a diverse series of dance, theater and musical performances. The performance artist Danny Hoch, the jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal and the Donald Byrd dance company were among its offerings last season.

The center also conducts workshops and classes in performing and fine arts. And it is also still used for such varied activities as meetings, beauty pageants, weddings and even the occasional funeral.

"The Carver has always been the anchor for the African-American community here," said Eduardo Diaz, who, as director of the city's Office of Cultural Affairs, has often clashed with Ms. Long and those in the Carver neighborhood, but who also takes classes at the Carver in Latin and African drumming. "And they've done so much in terms of sharing with San Antonio. Alvin Ailey, McCoy Tyner, the Harlem Boys Choir, A Traveling Jewish Theater: none of these would have come here without the Carver."

	Bob Owen for The New York Times
	Jo Long, director of the Carver Community Cultural Center.

For Robinson, the gift melds two aims: to help the neighborhood and to establish a permanent "ministry," as Robinson, who describes himself as a devout Christian, is wont to call any organization devoted to social service.

Oddly absent from his thinking is any motivation to support the arts. He had only been to the Carver once before he began talking with Ms. Long, he said, for an event he cannot recall.

"I'm not an arts guy," said Robinson, who graduated from the United States Naval Academy with a degree in mathematics. "My thing is math, computers. And education."

The school he wants to build through the David Robinson Foundation, which he finances personally and administers jointly with his wife, will not be an arts school but one with a rigorous academic (and secular) curriculum. It will not be a charter school. It will have its own governance, a board separate from the Carver Center that is now being formed and will shortly begin a search for a headmaster. In essence, his wishes have been grafted onto the Carver, with the result that the profile of the whole will be enhanced, but changed forever.

Carver officials say that the school is certainly in line with the institution's historical mission to serve the needs of the neighborhood, and that in any case the two will be governed independently.

The arts center is planning its own education program in visual and performing arts as part of its renovations. But its program of presentations is not to be significantly expanded, only improved by the addition of wing and fly space, a new roof and a new air-conditioning system and the construction of a small performance space in an old church on the grounds. Robinson's $5 million was given with his permission for it to be used by the Carver Development Board, as challenge grants to attract other donors.

"It's the best opportunity this board has ever had to raise money for the Carver and its programs," said Navarra Williams, the president of the local cable television company, who, with Ms. Long, has been the Carver's chief fund-raiser.

Ms. Long has been at the fulcrum of all this activity.

In addition to running the Carver she has been visiting independent schools nationwide and otherwise educating herself about how a school is built. And most pressing, she has been raising money.

The Carver Development Board both is relatively young -- it was formed in 1987 -- and has been reconstructed in the wake of the Robinson gift to include the lawyers, bankers and capital projects experts the new complex demands; it has yet to develop the unity and financial clout to operate as an effective fund-raising body.

"Building a board takes time," said Charles O. Deriemer, the retired chairman of the Southwestern Bell Corporation Foundation, who served as a consultant in the Carver board reconstruction.

"Carver does not have the social cachet" of a an established mainstream arts organization, he said. "And it never will have.

"Many of the board members are African-Americans, influential residents without financial resources, and you don't want to give that up so you can have the wives of some C.E.O.'s. The board will always have to balance roots in the east side with the new sprouts that have to emerge."

Thus far Ms. Long and Williams have brought in $3.5 million of the necessary $6 million, but both acknowledge that local corporate support has been slow.

Most of the money has come from the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Kronkosky Charitable Foundation, a new local fund.

And most of that was raised by Ms. Long. "She was involved in every dollar we've raised," Williams said. "It's a lot of pressure when it's not what you're used to doing every day."

The Carver sits on North Hackberry Street, sharing an intersection with a mortuary in a mostly residential neighborhood, its homes aging, many of them not well. A model of the future Carver Complex, a campus of several buildings filling four square blocks, sits on a table in the Carver center now, a plywood embryo.

Designed by a local firm, Lake/ Flato, it shows a handsome series of low-lying brick and glass structures surrounding plots of greensward. It would take the place of some 16 private homes, many of which will be moved, with their residents, to vacant lots on nearby streets.

"It's going to be a real challenge for them," said Palmer Moe, the executive director of the Kronkosky fund. "Developing a private school from scratch and filling it with kids who won't be able to pay tuition won't be easy."

But after a pause, he expressed a sentiment that could be used as a mantra around here. "If people don't dream, things don't get done," he said.

The city has put on hold its effort to cut back on its funds for the Carver, and it is helping with the acquisition of property.

In another good sign, the Robinson gift has already stirred neighborhood development; just around the corner, a vast, eroding structure, long ago the home of the Friedrich Refrigeration Company, is now being renovated for a mixed-use complex to include residences, business offices and light manufacturing.

Planning and financing are on schedule for construction of the Carver Complex to begin next spring, and for full programming in a renovated Carver Center to resume in the fall of 2001, the same time that the first class of students is to enter the Carver Academy.

In Ms. Long's absence, the assistant director of the city's Department of Community Initiatives, Henry Ross, is serving as interim manager.

"Almost all of us associated with the Carver are trying to fulfill the vision Jo Long has had," said Creswell, the Carver's board chairman. "All of us are protective of Jo. But it may get to a point where we have to say, 'We've got to move on.'

"So I'm worried about two things. The continuity of leadership, finding a person with some vision, who can operate nationally and be sensitive to the people who live within four blocks of here."

He paused. The second thing? "I guess that's the second thing, too," he said.