The Yleana Leadership Foundation exists to fight the cycle of entrenched poverty – which necessitates breaking the correlation between race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status.

The Yleana Leadership Academy provides a holistic and transformative summer experience for our future leaders from traditionally underserved and underrepresented groups. 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, and
(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. Yleana is emphatically NOT a creaming organization; our Academy accepts students all over the academic curve (from a 0.7 to a 5.3 GPA historically). 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.