Mission

The Yleana Leadership Foundation exists to fight the cycle of entrenched poverty - which necessitates breaking the correlation between race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status.  To do that, we increase the selectivity of the colleges our students attend, in order to: 

1. Increase persistence and graduation rates and access more supportive programming

2. Secure better financial aid packages and decrease loans, allowing students to start life with less debt

3. Increase salaries after graduation - double and triple what students would have made after a less selective college

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.

Our flagship program, the Yleana Leadership Academy, is a summer camp experience at Colgate University and Mount Holyoke College which is part [1] college access experience (yes! I - and students like me - belong at college!), part [2] elite SAT prep (the top 50% of kids increase 140-360 points in 119 hours of prep!) and part [3] college persistence skills like critical thinking, perspective-taking, self-advocacy, real world professional skills, creativity/imagination - and the ability to meet BIPOC/HM mentors (through Imagination Workshops - career exposure - and our Entrepreneurship One-Day Startup Fair, the cap on every Yleana session).  At those sessions, Yleana's Eight Pillars work together to create a space that not only focuses on college access and persistence, but gives us space to create a loving safe space that concentrates on the whole person.

We are emphatically NOT a creaming organization; we take kids all over the academic curve (from a 0.7 to a 5.3 GPA historically), but in order to make systematic change, we serve the thick middle (68%) of the academic bell curve.  We believe that if you need to get to college, we want to support you in getting into the best one possible, to minimize loans and maximize salary on the other end. Raising your SAT score 130-180 points is a transformational shift in terms of the colleges that will accept you; it will significantly change your post-college financial outcomes. Learn more about Yleana’s impact: https://bit.ly/Yleana-overview

Besides this, we have been approached by school districts, schools, and CBOs to offer a host of other services as fee-for-service to underwrite our flagship program.  Folks who have worked with us see our warmth, positivity, and dedication to students; our focus on research; our meticulous approach; our strengths-driven approaches centering around the epiphany; and our unflagging enthusiasm (learn more about the 14 tenets of our teaching/instructional philosophy: bit.ly/Yleana-teaching-tenets) - and those characteristics impel them to ask us if we can support them in other ways.  

As long as these requests serve our mission of decreasing the opportunity gap, we are happy to serve - projects have ranged from instructional coaching to college/career readiness to social justice issues classes to content remediation (ELA and math) to performing a curriculum audit. Supporting in this way keeps us fresh, sharp, cutting edge, and ultimately makes us even better teachers and trainers for our summer Academy as well as helping us keep the Academy free for students.  Learn more about the programs Yleana offers: http://bit.ly/yleana-programs-TOC

Our teaching is, at its heart, Socratic/Harkness method-led, trauma-informed, and focuses on understanding the test as a set of patterns and recognizing the SAT as an instance of a standardized test - recognizing hallmarks of a system.  At the same time, because our ED started as an IEP tutor (for students with learning differences), we're very good at identifying and plugging students' content holes and being nimble in our explanations of concepts large and small.

In a nutshell, we take the scores kids are actually capable of reaching and get those scores to show up as our kids' SAT test results. Our kids are smart - our job is to get their scores to reflect that.  In just three weeks, we see some amazing results: our kids have fun, their scores increase dramatically, and they learn that they can be successful in anything they set out to do even in new environments with peers from other cities.  

Learn more about Yleana’s impact: https://yleana.org/baltimore | https://yleana.org/boston-northshore | https://yleana.org/new-york-city | https://yleana.org/philadelphia

Current Board/RLC joint committees

• Executive

• Finance

• Membership/Nomination

• Events/Fundraising

• Growth

• Regional events committee in each city (RLC only)

When/how do we meet?

• HOW: Each location will have in-person/virtual meetings with the other members in their area as well as occasional virtual meetings with all RLC members.

• WHEN: approximately every 1-2 months, or whenever we need to.