Deborah Bial, Posse Foundation founder and president

How the Posse Foundation began with a simple idea, and how it thrives with vision, impact, and the support of schools like Denison University

By Alexander Gelfand

Deborah Bial freely admits that when she first hatched the idea behind the Posse Foundation, she didn't fully understand just how difficult it would be to turn that idea into reality—or even what the full ramifications would be.

Bial was only 23 years old at the time, fresh out of Brandeis, and teaching in an after-school leadership development program in the New York City public schools. In what has become her best-known anecdote—the one that someone is almost guaranteed to repeat when Denison awards Bial an honorary doctorate at this year’s Commencement—a young man once said to her, “I would never have dropped out of college if I had my posse with me.”

Bial believed him. So she launched a nonprofit to send cohorts—or “posses”—of ten urban students to selective colleges and universities on full scholarship. The program would grant the students access to schools they might not otherwise have the means or inclination to attend, along with a built-in support system to help them stick it out. The schools, meanwhile, would get a pipeline for inner-city applicants who had been selected not only on the basis of academic merit, but also for their leadership qualities.

If the premise seems simple, implementing it was not. Colleges and corporate sponsors were hardly eager to endorse an untested recruitment model. “We didn’t have any funding. Sometimes, I didn’t get paid,” Bial says. “I was living—what’s that expression?—hand-to-mouth.”

Still, the College Board kicked in some free office space, and Bial was able to round up a group of gifted teens. Then, in 1989, Vanderbilt University agreed to host a pilot program. “They took a chance on a program that had no track record and no funding,” Bial says. “It was just an idea. But they thought it was a good one.”

They were right. Today, the Posse Foundation partners with 37 colleges and universities to recruit students from seven cities across the country. Denison University, a charter affiliate of the foundation’s Chicago office, is now one of only nine institutions to host Posses from more than one town; the first Chicago Posse arrived in 2001, the first Boston Posse in 2005. At any given time, there are roughly 80 Posse Scholars on campus. “[President] Dale Knobel is part of a network of selective college leaders who believe this is important,” says Bial. “So he’s making it happen.”

The foundation has thus far identified 3110 Posse Scholars. More than 90 percent go on to graduate, well above the national average; 45 percent earn graduate degrees; and a whopping 70 percent either found an organization or assume leadership of an existing one. Those numbers have helped garner what Bial describes with almost startling modesty as “some nice recognition.” In 2007, Bial received a “genius award” from the MacArthur Foundation. And this past March, President Barack Obama announced that the Posse Foundation would be one of only 10 organizations to receive a $125,000 chunk of his Nobel Peace Prize award.

By nurturing young leaders, Posse also has become an engine for social justice—something that Bial did not foresee when she founded the program more than 20 years ago. “These kids from the city who go to selective colleges and then go out and become leaders will represent Americans in a more diverse way than they’re being represented now,” she says.

Like access and leadership, the notion of diversity also lies at the heart of Posse. But it is easily misunderstood. “‘Diversity’ is not a synonym for ‘black’,” Bial says. “Posse and Denison understand that diversity means everybody.”

“We get a wide range of students, spanning race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and class,” says Dr. Toni King, a professor of Black Studies and Women’s Studies who acts as Denison’s liaison to the Foundation. But they are united by three things: all come from the big city; all share what King calls “an ability to put themselves in a situation with others and move them toward a vision”; and few, if any, would have found their way to Denison without help.

You get a sense of all that in speaking to Sorailla Duquerette ’10, a psychology and education double major who has served as an RA for the past two years and plans to continue working in higher education (becoming one of the 35 percent of Posse Scholars who work in the nonprofit and education sectors.) Duquerette’s mother is Haitian; her father, Dominican. Both graduated from college, and Duquerette assumed that she would, too.

But the Boston native never dreamed that she would attend a small, selective liberal arts college in the Midwest, or rub up against students from the ’burbs—let alone ones who hail from other countries, or grew up on farms. “I wouldn’t have thought that I would have met people like this,” she says. “I don’t think that I was naive, but it’s opened up my mind.”

Not that coming to Granville was easy. “At one point or another, everyone in our Posse wanted to leave,” Duquerette says. “But you find yourself thinking, ‘What would happen to my Posse if I left?’” This from a person who initially resisted hanging out with her Posse at all, seeing it as a form of “forced friendship.” Today, she describes it in rather different terms. “They’re family,” she says simply.

And so we return to the motor that drives one of the country’s most admired educational initiatives—one that was founded on little more than a flash of insight and a great deal of faith in the single, simple, brilliant idea that ten young people might accomplish together what one alone could not. In so doing, they will better not only themselves and the institutions fortunate enough to receive them, but also society at large.