The CUNY Health and Opportunity Leadership Institute (HOLI) is thrilled to announce it has received a two-year grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) to support HOLI’s work.
To date, SNF has given roughly $4 billion in support for initiatives in health and sports, arts and culture, education, and social welfare in 137 countries. A core value of SNF’s grants is a commitment to collaboration across sectors and disciplines, which is central to HOLI’s work as we engage and empower the next generation of health leaders to step into leadership roles.
The SNF grant will support HOLI students’ experiential learning activities, leadership development and mentorship, as they prepare to become change-makers — ensuring we collectively build a health system that works for all of us.
More than 370 CUNY students have signed up to be part of HOLI to date, with 15 fellows and senior fellows committing to mentor students and involve them in their health-focused initiatives. So far, 12 regional and national health-focused organizations have signed up to partner with HOLI and mentor and engage students in experiential learning and career preparation activities; and over $1.4M has been raised from regional and national foundations and individual donors to support the initiative’s operations and projects.
About HOLI
The Health and Opportunity Leadership Institute (HOLI), founded in January 2025, revolves around the natural strengths of students at the City University of New York (CUNY). They are passionate, motivated to improve health for all, and rooted in communities too often excluded from opportunities to shape their own health and economic outcomes. By unlocking their leadership potential, HOLI equips students to become the boundary-crossing leaders our country needs to solve its most pressing health challenges. These students are not only future physicians, public health practitioners, policy thinkers, and entrepreneurs — they are the ones who will help ensure every community can celebrate more healthy birthdays.
Based at the Colin Powell School at The City College of New York, HOLI offers a first-of-its-kind center for CUNY undergraduates and graduate students, with didactics, leadership development, and experiential learning focused on real-world health gains. HOLI aims to reach 1,000 CUNY students each year through its programs in the first year and scale beyond that. Up to 50 of these students will immerse in more intensive mentorship and interdisciplinary projects each year.
About Stavros Niarchos Foundation
Since 1996, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) has made grants to nonprofit organizations and projects around the world, working with an incredible community of partners to create transformative change whose benefits multiply and are shared widely. Our mission, encompassing program areas of Arts & Culture, Education, Health & Sports, and Social Welfare, is broad by design. At its core are a fundamentally collaborative approach based on the expertise of partners on the ground, a commitment to public-private partnership, and a belief that everyone should have access to art, education, health care, and life’s other essentials.
A primary ongoing focus for SNF is our multifaceted Global Health Initiative (GHI), which aims to improve access to quality health care through a range of projects including building three new hospitals in Greece, offering new medical training programs, providing state-of-the-art equipment, leveraging international expertise to strengthen health infrastructure, and more.
