Our History
America’s Promise Alliance has long recognized that the challenges facing young people are too complex and interrelated for any one organization or institution to solve alone.
Since its founding more than 25 years ago—the result of an unlikely alliance among the five living presidents, former Michigan Governor George Romney, and the late ret. General Colin Powell—APA has mobilized the youth-serving sector to achieve progress around big, shared goals, including high school graduation, national service, and youth employment.
America’s Promise: The Alliance for Youth
In the spring of 1997, an extraordinary group of unlikely allies came together around a singular, shared goal: to set young people up for success in school, work, and life by collectively reducing the barriers that were keeping too many from reaching their potential.
The four living American presidents joined the late Ret. General Colin Powell in Philadelphia to mobilize thousands of leaders from across the country to make young people a top national priority. Ultimately, what was most remarkable about the event wasn’t the unprecedented assembly of powerful people, or their dedication to improving outcomes for the next generation. It was that they came to the consensus that no one leader, institution, or organization can solve these challenges alone, nor should they.
Gen. Powell was tapped to lead the newly formed “America’s Promise Alliance,” convening hundreds of grassroots conversations, which provided insight into the issues affecting young people and effective work being done to move the needle.
These conversations focused the Alliance on a set of five core promises that are made—implicitly and explicitly—to young people in this country. APA’s early work centered on the importance of a healthy start, access to caring adults, effective education, safe spaces in family and community life, and opportunities to serve on young people’s development; and translated the evidence base into insights that would quickly and effectively inform practice and improve outcomes.