Home / Our Mission
More Than an Entry Ticket to Academia
Where you start in life should never decide how far you can go.
Our Belief
Because Everyone Deserves the Chance to Learn
A single mother finishing her degree between shifts. A soldier coming home from reserve duty and starting over. Someone who is 45 and rebuilding a life that fell apart. Each of them carries the same right: the chance to sit in a classroom and build a different future.
Education is not a reward for the privileged. It is one of the only forces strong enough to change the direction of a life in a single generation, cultivating the entrepreneurship, innovation, and resilience that turn a family's story from survival into opportunity, and a community's story from struggle into strength.
That belief is why Friends of Peres Academic Center exists. A scholarship is not charity. It is a promise kept: that ability, determination, and hope will always matter more than a bank balance.
Not to fund an institution, but to keep a promise to a person.
What We Do
Four Ways to Get Them Across the Finish Line
We fund the programs and people who walk beside every student. Not just opening the door to higher education, but staying with them for the entire journey, through the successes and the setbacks, until they cross the finish line.
Academic Support
Tutoring, mentoring, and guidance to meet the demands of a degree, so falling behind for a semester never has to mean falling out.
Career Integration
Practical support entering the workforce and building a real path, turning a diploma into a career.
Emotional & Social Support
One-on-one and community care for the personal challenges of a degree, including subsidized therapy through our psychological clinic.
Peer Support Groups
A community of students walking the same road together, so no one has to get through it alone.
Which of these will your gift fund?
Watch
Adam's Success Story
Adam came back from reserve duty to a degree in information systems he had paused. "Strength in the Academy", a program of the Peres Academic Center, gave him the academic, emotional and social support he needed to finish it.
This is what those four kinds of support look like in one student's life.
Fund the Support That Keeps Students Enrolled
Choose a designated fund and see exactly where your gift goes, or give where the need is greatest.