The Friends of Leadership & Public Service High School is a unique not-for-profit organization of volunteers actively working to provide many different kinds of support to a regular public high school in downtown Manhattan, one that’s a mere stone’s throw from the 9/11 Memorial in NYC’s Financial District.
We do what we can to help repair our corner of the world.
We are continuously striving to support a public high school that needs and wants our support. Principal Philip Santos has said that he “feels blessed” to have our support. We have no overhead or staff, so all our donations go directly to our programs to benefit the students.
Leadership is a high school that makes great efforts to provide a rigorous education to a population of overwhelmingly low-income students, mainly first generation Americans with parents who have not achieved a college education and who often speak a language other than English at home. Our students’ families often don’t have a complete understanding of the importance of a college education, nor can they can fully support their children in their quest to become college-ready, educated adults.
A strong public school education is critical to all Americans. However, these days our public schools do not have sufficient funding to provide all the worthwhile and critical programs they need to fully educate today’s children.
That’s where we come in. We are a lean Board of Directors and each altruistic member is actively working on projects or programs for the school. Our students would otherwise lack the kinds of educational and cultural opportunities that most of us have experienced in our own youth.
Because of our special partnership with Syracuse University, which collaborated in the creation of Leadership back in 1993, we are able to get special assistance in a variety of programs that we run. (Read more about it on our “About the School” page.)