Ready To Rise
Comprehensive Campaign
$30 M Goal
Soon our space will reflect our vision
Imagine a school where learning and growth happen in a community centered in justice and joy. A place where girls feel emboldened to bring their full identities into the classroom, find their voice, and embrace their brilliance.
A space where students are challenged to redefine what is expected of them and create a roadmap to their dream lives through emotional well-being and academic excellence.
Esperanza Academy is this place.
Last year, rising eighth grader Chenaiyalin captured a beautiful vision for a place Esperanza can call home one day. In the video, Chenaiyalin thoughtfully outlines spaces deserving of Esperanza’s dedication to community, literacy, food insecurity, and sustaining support. She imagines a place for graduates to return for comfort and help. She envisions a fridge full of free food. She visualizes a library with over 1,000 books. She dreams of dedicated spaces for after-school activities. She explains how gardens can be used to grow everything from peppers to pumpkins. Some people might hear Chenaiyalin’s wishes and dismiss them as childish dreams. But not at Esperanza. We took her ideas, along with the sketches of her classmates, the stories of their families, the impressions of our alumni, and the needs of our faculty, and created blueprints for the future that will hold and uplift our school community for generations.
The Problem
Most urban schools are bare-bones programs focused on standardized test preparation, ultimately failing to educate the students they serve. Because of systemic racism, communities of color, and girls in particular, are at greater risk of experiencing fewer qualified teachers, inferior infrastructure, and less access to high-quality curriculum. Through our innovative programming, we have fundamentally reimagined what urban education can look like—and it’s working. However, our long-term impact is constrained by our physical location. Simply put, we have outgrown our building. The layout and limited space of our school means that even the most creative solutions can’t accommodate the demand to serve more students starting at an earlier age.
Our Solution
We’ve created a school carefully designed to serve the needs of low-income urban students well. Now we are ready to expand our impact. Moving to a new location will allow us to add a lower school to our middle school. By growing our one-of-a-kind, tuition-free, all-girls model to begin in Kindergarten, we will catch students earlier in life and have more time to move them through our program and out of poverty. The future Esperanza Academy will also include an expanded Graduate Support Center that supports our alumni through high school, college, and early entry into the workforce. A new space will allow us to increase programming and services so as to ensure higher levels of student success with broad and deep community engagement.
We are creating the ideal space for our students to realize their hopes and dreams
We are investing in our school as a critical community hub that can support the well-being and success of students and their families. Our new home will create important opportunities for us to grow. It will include places to learn, to play, to discover, and to dream.
Eating healthy meals has been linked to higher grades, better memory and alertness, and faster information processing
Esperanza understands the power of nutrition in helping to create successful trajectories. Our Cafeteria, located in the heart of the new space, will continue to prioritize bringing the school together around hot breakfasts, nutritional lunches and delicious snacks. Our Community Kitchen will support relationship and skill building, center diverse cultural traditions, and offer hands-on learning for math and science. Our in-school Bodega will provide no cost and no stigma access to healthy food and family necessities, school supplies, and winter layers.
Math proficiency predicts future earnings more than any other subject and success in middle school can set students up for rewarding STEM careers
We believe igniting a spark in our students for STEM fields will build a better world for all of us. At Esperanza we help our students see themselves as engineers, doctors, scientists, and researchers. Our program demystifies STEM for our students and introduces them to relatable role models. A new facility will help our students discover who they can become, build confidence through experience, and create opportunities to increase after-school programming. A state-of-the-art laboratory space for experiments, and makerspace for engineering, will be supported with curriculum resources for science and adjacent topics like coding, circuits, and 3D-modeling.
Low-income students who are highly engaged in the arts are more than twice as likely to graduate college as their peers with no arts education
Music and art are a transformative part of our student experience at Esperanza. On any given day you might encounter a young girl finding her voice through performing original spoken word poetry. Or witness a student paint her dreams for the future. Or stumble upon a self-portrait studio incorporating the history of braids. In the new space, enhanced music and arts programming will include Music Therapy services for individuals and groups including students, graduates, and families, and Art Therapy and Instruction. We are also creating a student-curated Museum to celebrate marginalized voices and the history of immigrant women.
First-generation students face so many challenges on the path to higher education
Esperanza’s long-term commitment, individualized attention, and collaborative approach help address the barriers our graduates face so that they can center their values, strengths, and interests as they pursue their high school, college, and career goals—ultimately stepping into the lives they deserve. Our new space will support expanded programming to help further narrow opportunity gaps for our first-generation students. Alumni will be welcomed back to our Graduate Success Center for Workshops on everything from financing college to choosing a major; and they’ll be encouraged to take advantage of quiet spaces to study, and our resource library loaded with books and software.
When we take the energy of Esperanza and empower it with up-to-date facilities and room to grow, it will lead to girl power the likes of which the world has yet to see.
This project is about more than bricks and mortar. It is an investment in lifting our community out of poverty. Esperanza Academy’s Ready to Rise campaign is being supported through a combination of individual donors, corporate grants, and foundations. We have raised $26M so far.
Your contribution will make a difference. The sum of all gifts will help Esperanza rise and step into its future.
Upcoming Ready to Rise Events
Host a small gathering in your home or community! In addition to events listed, we are also co-hosting private small gatherings with our supporters, if you are interested in partnering with us, contact us today.
Thank You Lead Donors
Thank You Lead Donors
Anonymous (3)
Lucy and Tom Abisalih
Amelia Peabody Foundation
Denise Bordonaro and David Johst
The Evans Family Fund
It Kicks! Foundation
New Balance Foundation
Jeff Newton
Mike and Janet Rogers
The van Otterloo Family Foundation
The Wellington Management Foundation
The 72 Fund