Posse Foundation
| Founded | 1989 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Deborah Bial |
| Type | Education |
| Focus | Posse |
| Location |
|
|
Area served
|
Atlanta, Bay Area, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York City, Washington, D.C. |
| Method | Identifies, recruits and trains student leaders to pursue their academics and to help promote cross-cultural communication on campus. |
|
Key people
|
Jeffrey Ubben, Chairman Deborah Bial, President & Founder |
|
Revenue
|
US $13.0 million (2006) |
| Endowment | US $35.0 million (2006) |
| Website | www.possefoundation.org |
| 2015 Posse Foundation Annual Report | |
The Posse Foundation is an American nonprofit organization that identifies, recruits, and trains student leaders from public high schools to form multicultural teams called "Posses" of 10 to 12 Posse Scholars. These teams are then prepared, through an intensive eight-month Pre-Collegiate Training Program, for enrollment at top-tier universities nationwide to pursue their academics, help promote cross-cultural communication and become leaders on college campuses.
Posse has three goals designed to address some critical issues of importance to institutions of higher education in the United States today:
(From the Posse Foundation Web site.)
University admissions offices in the United States often search for ways to identify “non-traditional” candidates who might contribute greatly to and benefit greatly from their institutions. As a result of its belief that traditional measures sometimes miss capable students, Posse has developed an intensive alternative evaluation strategy called the Dynamic Assessment Process (DAP), hoping to identify youth leaders who can succeed despite varying scores on tests such as the SAT. The Posse Scholarship is neither a minority nor a need-based scholarship and is open to students of all backgrounds.
According to the Posse Foundation, many colleges and universities experience a climate where students from different backgrounds find little opportunity to interact. The Posse Foundation aims to train students to improve their leadership skills so that they can help colleges and universities address diversity issues on campus.
The Posse foundation hopes to improve college retention and completion rates for students of different backgrounds.
For eight months before they begin their college career, Posse Scholars attend a weekly Pre-Collegiate Training Program. The goal of this training program is to prepare Posse Scholars for as many as possible of the academic, social, and personal challenges they may face in their college career.
The PossePlus Retreat is a collaborative, focused group discussion on a contemporary issue which Posse Scholars and invited college community members will conduct every year in a retreat setting.
Before 2008, Posse Scholars from individual colleges will select a particular discussion theme, facilitated by Posse trainers, for their college's PossePlus Retreat. Since 2008, Deborah Bial, the founder of Posse Foundation, introduced a new discussion theme selection process which all of the Posse PlusRetreats across the entire nation will have a unified, rather than individual, discussion theme. Similar to the previous selection process, Posse Scholars from individual colleges will first choose a discussion theme for their college. Then, the Posse staff will discuss, analyze and refine those themes that are collected from individual colleges. Finally, the Posse staff will deduce an articulated common theme for all of the PossePlus Retreats for that year.
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