The Colin Powell School's inaugural Lavender graduating class, May 2022.
The City College of New York’s Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership is pleased to be the recipient of a generous $100,000 multi-year gift from the Leonard-Litz LGBTQ+ Foundation to support the expansion of CCNY’s LGBTQ+ Student Center and the Mixner LGBTQ+ Equality Fellowship program.
“We serve precisely those in our society who come from communities that have historically been denied power,” said Andrew Rich, the Richard J. Henley and Susan L. Davis Dean of the School. “Our investment in student learning, training, and success has been the foundation for new initiatives at CCNY designed to support our LGBTQ+ students, who are finding their voices, their values, and their power while studying here.”
The Leonard Litz LGBTQ+ Foundation, a private foundation based in Connecticut, was established to fund organizations working to advance the interests and well-being of the LGBTQ+ community, with a specific focus on LGBTQ+ communities of color, and transgender and gender-nonconforming people.
“This one is also personal for me,” said Elliot Leonard, one of the founding trustees of the Foundation, and a former CCNY student. “CUNY helped me get to where I am today, and I am grateful that they’re still creating opportunities for young people of all backgrounds to have access to social and economic mobility in a time of increasingly prohibitive higher education costs.”
“Higher education is not just academic,” added Colin Hosten, Executive Director of the Foundation. “For LGBTQ+ students, in particular, the opportunities these programs will offer to connect with new friends, advisors, mentors, and a supportive community on campus could make a meaningful difference in their future success.”
The entire CUNY community is inspired by the generosity of the Leonard Litz LGBTQ+ Foundation, and looks forward to partnering with them in the important work of building power within our LGBTQ+ students to help them affect community change, said Rich. “We acknowledge with thanks the essential role of Mr. Mitch Draizin, President of the CUNY LGBT Advisory Council, in introducing the Leonard-Litz Foundation to CUNY and CCNY and for his leadership of efforts across CUNY to provide more intensive support for our LGBTQ+ students.”
About The Leonard Litz LGBTQ+ Foundation
The Leonard Litz LGBTQ+ Foundation is committed to helping LGBTQ+ people achieve their full potential by funding local community-based organizations working in advocacy, programming, and services that meet the needs of our community, particularly in the areas of Health and Wellness, Crisis Intervention, Racial Justice, Advocacy and Community Engagement, and Social Assistance and Programming. Click here for more about the foundation.
About the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership
Established in April 2013, the Colin Powell School is home to the social science departments at CCNY as well as the core leadership development and public service programs of the College. With almost 4,000 students, and graduating the most CCNY students annually, the Colin Powell School mission is to transform the nation’s most diverse student body into tomorrow’s global leaders. Half of our students are immigrants; more than seventy percent are first-generation college students. Eighty percent are people of color. Most come from lower income backgrounds. The Colin Powell School and City College remain among the most effective engines of economic and social mobility in the United States. The School is led by a faculty dedicated to the highest standards of research and to the university’s democratic and public obligations. Read more about the Colin Powell School.
About the City College of New York
Since 1847, The City College of New York has provided a high-quality and affordable education to generations of New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. CCNY embraces its position at the forefront of social change. It is ranked #1 by the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights out of 369 selective public colleges in the United States on the overall mobility index. This measure reflects both access and outcomes, representing the likelihood that a student at CCNY can move up two or more income quintiles. Education research organization DegreeChoices ranks CCNY #3 nationally for social mobility. In addition, the Center for World University Rankings places CCNY in the top 1.8% of universities worldwide in terms of academic excellence. Labor analytics firm Emsi puts at $1.9 billion CCNY’s annual economic impact on the regional economy (5 boroughs and 5 adjacent counties) and quantifies the “for dollar” return on investment to students, taxpayers and society. At City College, more than 15,000 students pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in eight schools and divisions, driven by significant funded research, creativity and scholarship. This year, CCNY launched its most expansive fundraising campaign, ever. The campaign, titled “Doing Remarkable Things Together” seeks to bring the College’s Foundation to more than $1 billion in total assets in support of the College mission. CCNY is as diverse, dynamic and visionary as New York City itself. View CCNY Media Kit.