Meet Our Board of Directors: Paul Herro
May 30, 2024
Meet Our Summer Interns
June 25, 2024By: Ricky Austin
Last week, the Aim Higher team surprised me with a delicious apple crisp (my favorite). The much-appreciated gesture was to recognize the completion of my seventh year at the Aim Higher Foundation and the beginning of my eighth. With a broader lens, it is the beginning of the 20th in service to the mission of Catholic schools.
Many of you have served the mission in one form or another for double or triple that amount of time. You might share in the mixed feelings. On one side, you know of the enormous pride for what work we have accomplished—looking back and seeing the successes marked on the path of our journey: children who found their calling and are making the world a better place; and schools which are today stronger than they were before.
On the other hand, you have a clear view of the mountain still to climb.
Wherever you are on that path, we all know the mountain is still there, and we must climb. Catholic schools are one of the most powerful instruments of justice and hope for families otherwise trapped poverty. They are one of the most effective and important resources for evangelization. Research continues to show Catholic schools are unmatched in the achievement and attainment benefits they provide to students—particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Ricky Austin is the president of the Aim Higher Foundation
And yet, despite all this, we know the tension between the need to charge for tuition and the desire to keep doors open to all students, regardless of their backgrounds, puts pressure on the system of Catholic schools. Since 2000, 2,500 Catholic schools across the country have closed, frustratingly, not because of the quality of those schools, but because that tension was stretched too far and broke.
And so, we climb. The driving force of the American Catholic school system has been and continues to be the work of accessibility. It is also the mountain we must scale to ensure a bright future for both the students and the schools we seek to serve. From St. Elizabeth Ann Seton to St. Katherine Drexel of yesterday—to the faculty and staff working tirelessly today—to those of you who have made the Aim Higher Foundation one of your philanthropic priorities, the Catholic school story has been written in large part by those who dedicated lifetimes to making sure all families who seek a faith-filled, values-based, rigorous education, could enroll their children in a Catholic school.
For the early American saints, accessibility work meant building schools in a growing, ever-changing, and sometimes anti-Catholic new country. For today’s Catholic school champions, it’s not building, it’s fundraising. It’s problem solving. It’s storytelling. It’s lobbying.
But the outcome we seek is the same. Every child should be able to access the life changing benefits of a Catholic school. It’s good for the child. It’s good for the community. And it’s good for our country.
Somehow. . .150 years together in this same mission, in our 150 year-old “one thing,” the work must continue. It must be renewed. And so, we climb the mountain, facing head on the challenges of today and those which come our way tomorrow. It’s for the kids. . . so I’ll see you at the top. We’ll have an apple crisp waiting for you.
Make a gift before June 30! And your gift could be doubled!
All new gifts (of any amount) and all recurring monthly gift commitments made before June 30th will be matched up to $5,000. Our deepest appreciation to Tony and Becky Moch (themselves new supporters of Aim Higher Foundation) for this generous and exciting matching challenge.
