About Us
History
Project Leadership is a 10-year old organization that blossomed out of a generous investment from Lilly Endowment, Inc. in 2000, when Lilly funded a Community Alliances to Promote Education (CAPE) program in Grant County. Then in 2007, with funding from local partners who believed in the capability of the organization, Project Leadership tightened its education-based mission and began recruiting eligible students to become Twenty-first Century Scholars. At the time, only 16% of the eligible students in Grant County were enrolled in the state program, which offers up to four years of college tuition to public Indiana universities.
Since 2007, Project Leadership’s efforts and partnerships have lead to staggering increases in enrollment, which has increased from 38% in June 2007 to 80% student enrollment in June 2009. That means that in the past enrollment year alone (2009), 1,087 Grant County students signed up for a program in which they could receive up to $26 million in college tuition.
While increasing Scholars program enrollment is a positive and important step in moving students into college education, Project Leadership has been working to address this reality: The impact Twenty-first Century Scholars enrollment could have in our community will be dramatically minimized without consistent support to see students through their high school careers. As a result, in October 2007, Project Leadership launched a mentoring program for Scholars after local school administrators identified its need.
In the first two years of the mentoring program, community members logged more than 3,400 weekly sessions and more than 3,500 hours with high school students at risk of high school dropout.
Grant County’s program model and Project Leadership’s strong track record lead to a four-year grant from the Ball Brothers Foundation to replicate the model in neighboring Delaware County. In March 2009, Project Leadership Delaware County launched with two main goals: 1) Recruit additional students into the underutilized state Twenty-first Century Scholars program and 2) Implement a school-based mentoring program to support these Scholars that mirrors Grant County’s program. In February 2010, the Delaware County mentoring program launched with it s first mentor-mentee matches.