Yleana Celebrates $10,000 Grant from The Abell Foundation
New York, NY — Support from foundations in addition to private philanthropy has been instrumental in scaling our programs, reaching more students, and, in essence, bolstering our commitment to educational and economic equity. Yleana recently received a $10,000 Grant from The Abell Foundation to support our Baltimore students and alumni throughout their time at Yleana and the years beyond. Yleana is grateful for The Abell Foundation’s support, which will enable us to measurably decrease the racial wealth gap and opportunity gap for our Baltimore students and alums.
The Abell Foundation’s commitment will bolster our flagship program, Yleana Leadership Academy, a summer camp at Colgate University centered around college access experiences, elite SAT preparation, and the development of college persistence skills. This grant will provide the flexibility necessary to adapt to a landscape that is evolving and complex, and is a testament to the Abell Foundation’s shared mission of increasing college readiness, improving college access, supporting college persistence, and helping students generate wealth accumulation.
“This meaningful grant from The Abell Foundation will go a long way towards accomplishing our mission of eliminating the racial wealth gap by eliminating the opportunity gap in our education system,” 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.