“[Breakthrough] has demonstrated the kind of leadership that the Klingenstein Leadership Award was meant to acknowledge."
   - Pearl Rock Kane, Director, The Klingenstein Center

“[Breakthrough is based on what I believe is exactly the right formula - the community helping individuals to reach beyond their potential thereby enabling those individuals to enrich the community."
   - Madeleine Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State

Breakthrough Collaborative is a national non-profit that increases educational opportunity for high-potential, low-income middle school students and inspires outstanding college and high school students to pursue careers in education.

Consistently featured as a Top Ten Internship by the Princeton Review, Breakthrough’s innovative Students Teaching Students model partners middle-school students with college and high school students who serve as teachers, role models and mentors, providing real-life examples that it’s ‘cool to be smart’. Breakthrough boasts a proven ripple effect of positive results: 82% of Breakthrough student alumni are accepted to college preparatory programs and 72% of Breakthrough teachers, many of whom were Breakthrough students, go on to pursue professional careers in education.

Drawn from the public school system, 89% of Breakthrough's students are students of color and 65% qualify for free or reduced-price lunch programs. English is a second language for 27% of our students, and most will be the first in their family to attend college.

Students commit to a minimum of two years of tuition-free intensive six-week summer sessions and after-school programs in which they take classes in core academic subjects, and participate in elective courses ranging from astronomy to African-American literature. Breakthrough's classes are rigorous and small (a maximum 4:1 student to teacher ratio) and full participation is expected of every student.

Breakthrough was founded in San Francisco in 1978 as Summerbridge and serves more than 2,500 middle school students and trains 700 college and high school students as teachers in 34 Breakthrough sites across the U.S. and in Hong Kong.