Yleana Celebrates $10,000 Gift from Board Member Ann Taylor
New York, NY — The transformation of any organization with a strong emphasis on values-based community building practices takes strong leadership, the will of its community, a strategic plan for both stabilization and future growth, engaged students, and a committed philanthropic network driven to see Yleana persist and endure into the future. Yleana most recently received a $10,000 gift from Board member Ann Taylor to help address the ever-changing needs of our students.
Ann’s commitment will bolster our flagship program, Yleana Leadership Academy, a summer camp at Colgate University and Mount Holyoke centered around college access experiences, centered around helping underserved and disadvantaged kids experience a college campus, getting their SAT scores up enough to match their GPAs, participating in a trauma- and learning-challenged-informed elite college access experience that allows them to know they can thrive on a college campus, and starting them in a series of wraparound support programs that take them TO and THROUGH college. This leadership gift will provide the flexibility necessary to adapt to a landscape that is evolving and complex. Ann’s championing on behalf of students for Yleana through this gift is a testament to the care and impact the Board has had and will continue to have on Yleana.
Ann has spent the majority of her career at the intersection of academic medicine and the pharmaceutical industry, most recently as the Chief Medical Officer for AstraZeneca. She has dedicated her career in addressing health inequities, particularly in vulnerable, under-represented populations and communities. “Yleana Leadership Foundation is grateful for Board member Ann Taylor’s incredible generosity. Ann embodies Yleana’s mission through her philanthropy and passion. Her recent donation enables Yleana to put its energy towards students and towards making camp the best experience it can be. Ann goes above and beyond to support Yleana,” said Alyssa Bowlby, Co-Founder and Executive Director.
Due to circumstances of birth - race, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and much more - there exists a vast discrepancy in possibilities a student’s future holds: an opportunity gap. The opportunity gap gets even wider after college, where college creates student debt burdens and sets up starting salaries for students. The average college graduation rate for low-SES, first-gen students in the United States is 11-12%; Yleana’s college graduation rate is 80%. Multiplying the college graduation rate by 8 for first-gen and cutting student loans in half or getting rid of them completely means Yleana has a tangible impact on students’ financial outcomes - a college degree means they’ll make at LEAST (depending on which study you look at) 1 million more over the course of their lives, and that they will live seven years longer on average.
The Yleana Leadership Foundation sees the US’s racial wealth gap (economic/wealth accumulation) as a consequence of the opportunity gap (education). Our mission is to decrease the opportunity gap in order to decrease the racial wealth gap - by making sure students have access to the best resources possible as they enter college, we will change their economic position and ability to accumulate wealth as adults.
Our population is 95% BIPOC, primarily Black and Latinx, with an average family income of $32,829. We partner with high schools and CBOs in Baltimore, Boston/North Shore MA, NYC, and Philadelphia. We are emphatically a non-creaming organization, meaning our actions are directed at slow, incremental change in the thick middle of the curve.