Many community builders and funders want to know: How can we identify promising people early? How do we support them cost-effectively? What models actually change their trajectories? What pipelines and pathways help them achieve impact? Leaf’s latest cohort offers substantial data to help organizations and leaders better answer these questions.
Leaf works with exceptional teenagers who want to apply their talents to pressing global challenges. Through our summer 2025 cohort we focused on:
- Legal organizational setup and funding: We secured official legal entity status as a US-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit and received funding from Carina Initiatives to deliver programing through summer 2026.
- Scaling for cost-efficiencies: We delivered the same core 5-week, 5hrs./week program as summer 2024 to ~2x the students (367) at 0.5x the net costs-to-grantmakers, all with comparable student feedback and reported outcomes.
- Designing for top participants: We piloted a selective Fellows cohort (1% of original applicants) following our flagship courses, incubating 35 impact project proposals and building longer-term mentorship relationships for continued impact (at a cost of ~$142 per Fellow.)
- Building alumni pipelines: We referred 5,000+ subscribers to other high impact orgs. through our application and surpassed 3,000 course alumni on our mailing list. We generated 2,500+ unique clicks and >50% average open rates (MPP excluded) on monthly newsletters referring alumni to high-impact opportunities.
- We have generated dozens of thousands of dollars in marketing/engagement value to orgs. like Giving What We Can, Non-Trivial, 80,000 Hours, and others.
We expect that the results and data from these efforts aren’t just relevant to us, but offer lessons in funding models, pedagogy, and community-building that others in the ecosystem may also find useful. Our latest Leaf Summer 2025 Cohort Summary provides a detailed look into the data and our initial takeaways generated by these experiments, and has recommendations for sections on which to focus for various stakeholders. We hope sharing these results can support the community-building ecosystem and improve our ability to synergize with related efforts and organizations.
In 2026, informed by our 2025 data and lessons, Leaf plans to:
- Launch in the US and begin scaling a fully international model.
- Test and strengthen new donation-based financial models for sustainability while keeping accessibility central.
- Expand the selective Fellows program to support more top-student projects and impactful next steps.
- Deepen partnerships to connect applicants and participants with aligned orgs., internships, university groups, and opportunities.
- Evaluate long-run impact by tracking alumni choices in university, careers, and cause engagement.
To achieve these goals, we are seeking collaboration with:
- Student recruitment partners: Competitions, schools, and youth orgs. and networks to reach more exceptional 15-19 year-olds, especially in the U.S.
- Referral partners: Orgs. and programs where our exceptional alumni can contribute or continue their impact journey. (Both general impact-focused opportunities like uni. EA groups or Non-Trivial youth research fellowship and cause-area-specific opportunities like BlueDot Impact AI Safety courses or New Roots Institute animal welfare leadership fellowships).
- Funders: Ideas and referrals for sustainable revenue and philanthropic support.
- US-based student facilitators: Students at top U.S. universities interested in flexible, paid roles (a few hours/week Jan–April and June–Aug 2026).
- Pro bono advisors on U.S. expansion, financial modeling, and organizational growth and governance.
We welcome comments and questions about our experiments and data directly on our data doc. or by email to our Managing Director, Jonah Boucher ([email protected]).
