Harlem Educational Activities Fund, Inc.

HEAF changes the lives of underserved young people beginning in middle school and continuing in college and beyond through a youth development approach that includes rigorous year-round academic enrichment, social and cultural exposure and constant individual attention.

HEAF will become a sustainable national supplemental education model that is highly valued, heavily supported and continually broadening its footprint by building upon its extraordinary impact on the students it serves, their families and the community.

Here at HEAF, we have three goals:

1. Visibility -- we are an almost 30-year-old organization, but the best-kept secret in Harlem. How do we become more known to the college access community, education community, and a name all of New York City knows?

2. Innovation -- we strive to improve on the classes and technology we offer to our students to keep up with them, how they learn, what they are interested in, and what job prospects will they have when they are career ready.

3. Sustainability -- we need to diversify our funding base to ensure that we are sustainable for the next 30 years.

HEAF has focused our strategies around those three goals of Visibility, Innovation, and Sustainability helping us remain focused on our strategy to accomplish these goals each year.

Visibility: Create a recruitment strategy that includes partnerships with middle and high schools citywide and community organizations that will increase our student pipeline, increase community awareness. We will also build out our annual College Decision Day event to be tri-state focused, expanding our list of college access partners as well as students who participate in the event.

Innovation: Our focus will be on adopting technology to assist in: tracking student satisfaction and feedback, creating effective assessment tools, and to explore new classes and opportunities to offer to our students.

Sustainability:
For students, we want to be able to streamline our recruitment process from application to assessment. Our support also includes assisting students with scholarship resources and focus on financial literacy.

For staff, we want to be ever evolving our culture to fit the needs of our staff and assisting in creating more opportunities for growth as well as ensuring competitive salaries with competing organizations.

For fundraising, we are working hard on growing our individual reach, exploring new foundations, and finding new ways to engage volunteers and donors.

We are continually building a stronger team here at HEAF, creating a staff with more passion and more expertise in their fields giving us the ability to meet everyday challenges our organization faces. We are continually growing our Board and trying to get them more engaged. We currently have 26 diverse people from various backgrounds in finance, law, education and real estate.

We are also in the midst of developing a strategic growth plan to determine where we need to grow and how we do that to serve more New York City students, starting with our Brooklyn site.

We also have a brand new, state of the art technology Learning Lab that provides our students with innovative and exciting technologies to do and learn more.

We are growing our College Decision Day Event to include the tri-state area, to include more college access organizations. This year, we aim to have 25 partner organizations and 250 students announcing where they go to college on the historic Apollo Theater stage.

Over the past few years, we have made significant strides here at HEAF! We continue to grow and increase the students we serve both here in Harlem and our site in Brooklyn. This upcoming summer will be the first ever Summer Quest in Brooklyn (to be modeled after our HEAF@Harlem long-term summer programming) and we are excited to begin increasing Brooklyn to a full replication.

We have also continued to grow our two main events of the year College Decision Day and our Annual Gala, this most recent gala we surpassed our fundraising goal.

We continue to be innovative in the classes and curriculum we offer to our students as well as creative in the ways we partner with schools, community organizations, government, and corporate partners.

Striving to keep our program sustainable, we work hard in trying new things, expanding our funding circles with new foundation and corporation partnerships, as well as increasing the ways individuals can contribute. For the 3rd year, we will have our 11x11 campaign, our online peer to peer fundraising campaign, where we try to raise as much money as we can in 11 days in honor of our 11-year commitment to our students.