In 2000, a group of students at the Harvard Business School became finalists in its annual business-plan contest with a proposal for a new organization to train principals. Later that same year, New Leaders for New Schools was launched as an operating nonprofit, and by 2015 the program will have offered high-quality training to 2,000 new principals. It recently set a goal to also train 1,000 sitting principals every year. The program is expensive—six figures per candidate per year. Foundation, individual, and corporate donors sustain the group with approximately $20 million of annual support, with recent top donors including the Boeing Company, the Roberts, Robertson, Gates, Schwab, and Hyde foundations, the Carnegie Corporation, and more than a hundred other givers. The program is now known simply as New Leaders.
- Laura Vanderkam, Excellent Educators (The Philanthropy Roundtable, 2014) pp. 68, 74
- New Leaders 2012-2013 donors, newleaders.org/support/philanthropic-partners