The first decision a new foundation makes tells you what it believes. Here is ours, and the reasoning behind it.
There is a version of this foundation that spends its first year writing a strategy deck. We skipped it.
We started with scholarships because the failure we kept seeing was narrow and fixable. Students win admission on merit, then lose the place over fees that would not register as a rounding error in a New York budget. The talent was never the constraint. The cash flow was.
So the first program pays the whole cost, for the whole degree, directly to the institution. No annual renewal theater. No partial awards that leave a student one bad harvest away from dropping out.
What we are measuring
Completion rate, first job placement, and salary at 24 months. Not applications received. Not photographs at a handover ceremony. If a scholar does not finish, that is our failure to account for, and we will publish it.
What comes next
Health and agriculture follow, in that order, for the same reason: both have a clear measurable outcome and both have capable local organizations already doing the work who are short of money rather than short of competence.