Lead for Poughkeepsie (LFPK) is a local affiliate of Lead for America (LFA), a national service organization advancing place-based movements across the US that cultivate the next generation of civic leaders.* Since its launch in August 2021, LFPK’s signature initiative has been its Hometown Fellowship program. The program recruits young professionals with ties to the Poughkeepsie region to serve as AmeriCorps members in paid, full-time positions working alongside local leaders and social impact organizations in the City of Poughkeepsie to address pressing community needs and opportunities. The program’s goals are: attracting and retaining talent across all sectors in the greater Poughkeepsie region and training that talent to be civic leaders; creating new public narratives that position Poughkeepsie globally and connect its emerging leaders to social change ecosystems and resources; and collaborating with local school systems and higher education institutions to develop customized civic engagement and leadership programming that increases students’ involvement in the community and desire to stay and/or return after graduation. This year, LFPK placed nine Hometown Fellows at: Hudson River Housing, The Art Effect, Nubian Directions II Inc., MASS Design Group’s Hudson Valley Design Lab, the Vassar College Office of Community-Engaged Learning, the Poughkeepsie City School District, Scenic Hudson, and Lead for Poughkeepsie. Lead for Poughkeepsie leverages AmeriCorps national and state funding to substantially offset the cost of employing fellows at their host organizations.
Over the coming year, LFPK is planning to transition into a service collaborative to attract new service programs to the Poughkeepsie region and strengthen existing ones. As part of that transition, it has partnered with Ampact, a leading national service organization, to bring evidence-based kindergarten readiness and early grade math proficiency programming to Poughkeepsie as it creates talent pipelines for the next generation of educational leaders. LFPK and Ampact have worked together to obtain a planning grant from the federal government (through AmeriCorps National) to develop a place-based cradle-to-career strategy for scaling service year opportunities in the City of Poughkeepsie and Dutchess County region in the years to come.
During 2022, Lead for Poughkeepsie (LFPK) received both designated support for its programming and Management Assistance Program capacity-building support from the Dyson Foundation.
* Lead for Poughkeepsie programming has grown and changed since 2022, and now operates as part of a larger suite of programs operated by Ampact.