The Power of Collective Giving: Celebrating GivingTuesday
Support from our community of donors and volunteers has been instrumental in Yleana’s recent growth. Yleana is proud to celebrate the success of our 2022 GivingTuesday: The Campaign for Yleana. With the participation of 116 amazing donors, we exceeded our goal of 100 donors and raised a total of $19,743.57. With these funds, Yleana will be able to make a measurable impact on decreasing the racial wealth gap by decreasing the opportunity gap.
Yleana is thrilled to share that, through the collective participation and philanthropic efforts of our community, we were able to secure our challenge match of $25,000. All of the generous donations from our End-of-Year Campaign will go towards ensuring that Yleana Leadership Academy happens in person in 2023, and will help us to further spread the word about Yleana, paving the way for our future success and enabling us to continue our work in perpetuity.
“This campaign was one of Yleana’s most successful fundraising events ever,” said Alyssa Bowlby, Yleana’s Co-Founder and Executive Director. “Through the combined efforts of a tireless development staff team, dedicated Board and Council members, and our committed network of donors, we were able to exceed our goal and secure an extra $25,000 for our students. I feel extremely grateful, and want to thank everyone for their hard work, energy, and passion.”
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.