Yleana Celebrates Historic Unrestricted Gift of $25K for GivingTuesday
New York, NY — Yleana recently received a historic unrestricted commitment of $25,000 from an anonymous donor. The commitment will be used to help address the greatest needs of the organization while providing the flexibility and nimbleness necessary to address the ever-changing needs of students. More importantly, this gift will be used to position Yleana for greater success, advancing key initiatives like strategic planning, operational optimization, and student support services.
As Yleana celebrates our 10-year anniversary, we are honored to see leadership gifts ($5,000+) and major gifts ($25,000+) supporting the vision and mission of Yleana. “As an organization that lost our angel funder at the same time as the 2020 pandemic hit, knowing without a doubt that we have monies designated towards our students and organization's greatest needs will bolster our commitment to bridging the gap between access and education,” said Alyssa Bowlby, Co-Founder and Executive Director. This gift will be used to inspire donor participation and support for #GivingTuesday, a global generosity movement unleashing the power of people and organizations to transform their communities and the world through philanthropy, and our End-of-Year Campaign. This matching challenge will provide $250 for every donor we get, up to 100 donors.
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.