BUILD Wins Funding from The Goldman Sachs Foundation.

News Editors

MENLO PARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 19, 2003

Suzanne McKechnie Klahr, the founder and CEO of San Francisco Bay Area nonprofit BUILD and graduate of Stanford Law School, has been awarded a grant of $120,000 from the The Goldman Sachs Foundation's Social Entrepreneurs Fund, enabling her Menlo Park-based organization to expand its entrepreneurial training and education services for low-income youth. BUILD's (www.build.org) mission is to provide real-world entrepreneurial experience that empowers youth from under-resourced communities to excel in education, lead in their communities and succeed professionally.

The Goldman Sachs Foundation's Social Entrepreneurs Fund is a competitive program begun in 2001 to provide start-up or second-stage funding to smaller nonprofit initiatives likely to achieve excellence in education and youth development.

Created by McKechnie Klahr in 1999, BUILD provides mentoring by Silicon Valley business and community leaders, as well as hands-on business experience to help students from under-resourced communities succeed in high school and gain admission to college. Participants develop business plans, compete for funding, and grow their operations in BUILD's youth business incubator.

"Social Entrepreneurship Fund recipients such as BUILD have highly skilled leaders with exciting visions of how to create change with integrity and commitment. They have a passion for creative approaches to solve tough problems," said Stephanie Bell-Rose, president of The Goldman Sachs Foundation.

Along with funding through the Foundation, Goldman Sachs is providing business expertise through the placement of Eldrige Gray, one of its managing directors, on BUILD's board of directors. Gray has broad experience in private sector operations and finance and has served as chairman of the board for Upward Bound in New York City, whose mission is to increase the number of disabled students who go on to post-secondary education.

Thanks to the The Goldman Sachs Foundation grant, BUILD has extended its service area to include Woodside High School in Redwood City, Calif.; it already served high schools in Menlo Park and East Palo Alto. The number of students enrolled in BUILD's program has grown from 4 in 1999 to 56 in 2002 to over 100 this fall. Funds will be used for programmatic expansion to recruit and train new mentors.

The Goldman Sachs Foundation's philanthropic model "clearly works beautifully for small nonprofits such as BUILD," said McKechnie Klahr, who will participate with the Deans of Yale School of Management, London Business School and Columbia Business School at a leadership forum on social entrepreneurship presented by The Goldman Sachs Foundation at in New York City on September 24.

"BUILD will benefit greatly from this new partnership," she said.

Dedicated to Solutions

A self-described social entrepreneur, McKechnie Klahr says she "saw that the best way to assist low-income populations is to combine the effectiveness, discipline, and economic resources of the private sector with the compassion, community knowledge, and dedication of the public sector."

To create lasting, sustainable change, such assistance must allow recipients to achieve self-reliance and self-sufficiency without depending on dwindling traditional resources.

BUILD uses small business development as a vehicle to move students from under-resourced communities into better academic and professional settings. All nine high school seniors who completed the BUILD program in 2002 and 2003 have gone to college, eight of them to four-year colleges including Harvard, Stanford, Columbia and UC Santa Barbara.

About Goldman Sachs and BUILD

The Goldman Sachs Foundation is a global philanthropic organization funded by The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. The foundation's mission is to promote excellence and innovation in education and to improve the academic performance and lifelong productivity of young people worldwide. It achieves this mission through a combination of strategic partnerships, grants, loans, private sector investments, and the deployment of professional talent from Goldman Sachs. Funded in 1999, the foundation has awarded grants in excess of $43 million since its inception, providing opportunities for young people in more than 20 countries.

Businesses United in Investing, Lending and Development (BUILD) has the mission of providing real-world entrepreneurial experience that empowers youth from under-resourced communities to excel in education, lead in their communities, and succeed professionally. (www.build.org)