Dear Friends,
Twenty years ago, the first Posse packed their bags in New York City and got on a Greyhound bus headed for Nashville, Tennessee. These five students and their mothers spent 26 hours in anticipation. The trip they started that day was really the beginning of an incredible journey for the thousands of young people and their families who would follow—and an incredible journey for Posse.
Today, The Posse Foundation is finding talented young leaders in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City and Washington, D.C., and in 2009, opened its seventh site in Miami. Over 2,600 young people have become Posse Scholars. Thirty-six outstanding colleges and universities have become Posse partners. And more than 100 industry—leading companies and organizations have joined Posse to help prepare these young superstars for leadership positions in the workforce.
By the year 2020, we expect to see close to 6,000 Posse Alumni in the workforce. They will be doctors, lawyers, teachers, scientists, public officials—the people who will make the decisions that affect our collective lives. This new professional leadership network will be the most diverse this country has seen.
Thanks to the investment of our college and university partners, the commitment of our Career partners and the generosity of our donors, 2008 marked the 20th year for Posse, and with it we broke all records.
Our university partners identified 430 new Scholars across the country and awarded them more than $43 million in leadership scholarships. Bard College, Connecticut College, Kalamazoo College, Tulane University and University of California, Berkeley signed on. And Posse celebrated its first tri-city partner, the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
This year, Posse also created two new programs. With generous support from the Ford Foundation, we launched The Posse Institute—the research arm of the Foundation—to conduct and publish valuable studies on matters of higher education that affect not only our Scholars and the campus communities of our partner institutions, but our entire society. Posse Access—an online database that allows our partner schools to view profiles of students who are not selected for the Posse Scholarship and consider them for regular admission—also debuted this year, tremendously expanding opportunities for the many deserving young people we serve.
We couldn’t be prouder of our Scholars. In the last three years alone, 17 Posse Alumni have won Fulbright Scholarships to study, research and teach abroad. Posse now has close to 1,000 Alumni who are taking on top positions in the workforce, pursuing graduate degrees at leading institutions and exploring professional development opportunities in their communities and around the world—like 2008 Denison University graduate Romero Huffstead, recently elected to Denison University’s board of trustees; or Wheaton Alumnus Derron Wallace, who won the Marshall Scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge; or Vanderbilt Alumna Erica Spatz who served as chief resident at Montefiore Hospital in New York City and is now an internist and fellow in the prestigious Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at Yale University.
The five young people who took a chance and boarded that bus 20 years ago changed their lives and the lives of their families. But at Posse there is always a ripple effect. Posse Scholars have an impact on their families, on the young people who look up to them, on their peers both at home and in college, and then out in the workforce. The concept behind Posse underscores the importance of supporting the individual and the power of the collaborative.
Our Scholars and Alumni’s collective success reflects the transformative impact the program is having and gives cause for optimism about our country’s future.
Warmly,
Deborah Bial, President + Founder and Jeff Ubben, Chair