Leaf Inc

Leaf’s mission is to prepare and support exceptional teenagers to have a positive impact at university and with their career.

US-donors can make tax-deductible gifts here to our 501(c)(3); if you're in the UK and plan to give in £, please use this giving platform instead to avoid exchange fees. UK gifts are not eligible for Gift Aid.

Through our courses and community students:

• Engage deeply with big ideas and real-world challenges
• Make informed academic and career choices
• Build sustainable habits for long-term positive impact
• Find peers and mentors who make learning - and life - more meaningful

We identify and support exceptional young people with the potential to do extraordinary good. Our courses challenge students to think deeply, reason clearly, and act ambitiously. By bringing them together in selective cohorts, we aim to foster a community where they inspire and push each other toward lives of meaning and positive impact.

We are inspired by and have roots in recent movements like effective altruism and moral ambition, but we don’t treat any single philosophy as dogma. Instead, we encourage students to wrestle with hard questions: How can we best use our talents to improve the world? Which problems are most urgent? Where are we most likely to be wrong? We want participants to engage critically, not just adopt a set of ready-made answers.

Our courses are not just about learning ideas in the abstract. We push students to test them, critique them, and turn them into projects, passions, and careers that matter. Our alumni go on to pursue impactful research, tackle pressing global problems, advocate for positive change in their local and global communities, and build organizations of their own.

We select course participants carefully to make our core programs as impactful as possible with the resources we have available. At the same time, we strive to build a wider community where every altruistic teenager can find support, inspiration, and a place to belong, and therefore offer our online courses and community for free to all applicants.

Ultimately, we want every participant to discover meaningful opportunities to do good, and the skills and community to act on them.