Annie B. Veale Scholarship Fund

“Neither of my parents went to college. To have peers, college students and young professionals, to help me navigate that, it was so important,” said Veale who is now the Director of Elderly Services for the City of New Haven. “It was tremendous.”

Her mother, Annie B. Veale supported her fully as a LEAP Mom, “taking me out to get what I needed for a camping trip or other LEAP activities,” Veale said.

Then her mother began her own journey with LEAP. Retired from the Southern New England Telephone Company, Annie Veale took a part time job at LEAP and soon became the full-time receptionist.

“It was a complete passion for her,” Tomi Veale said. “She loved it. All the kids knew her. She’d be sitting outside in front of the house, and the kids would walk by and say, `Hey, Miss V.,’ and she’d talk with them. Everyone loved her. Engaging with the children and the staff kept my mom young.”

As a receptionist, Annie Veale “interacted with all 180 high school and college students who worked as LEAP’s junior and senior counselors,” said Henry Fernandez, LEAP’s executive director. “She was the first person they met when they came in for their job interviews; she was there when they came to get their paychecks. Her affection for the young people, her kind words, her sharing of her wisdom and her humor – all of those things influenced young people’s experience at LEAP every day.”

Annie Veale died in January 2023. To honor all she meant to the organization, LEAP co-founders Roslyn Milstein Meyer, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and a former assistant clinical professor in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, and her husband, Jerome Meyer, M.D., a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, and Anne Tyler Calabresi established the Annie B. Veale Scholarship Fund at The Community Foundation.

The Annie B. Veale Scholarship Fund will provide a scholarship each year to one of the senior counselors to cover the cost of books and fees and other incidental costs. While other LEAP scholarships through The Community Foundation are focused on academics, students who are strong in academics or athletics will be considered for this scholarship.

“The cost of books and all kinds of other things you need when you are going to college is very significant, and a lot of students who start college drop out because the financial wherewithal is not there,” Dr. Milstein Meyer said.

Tomi Veale concurred. “I can remember that I had a math textbook that cost $260 and when you get that expense, it hits hard.”

Back in 1992, community activists, including the Meyers, Anne Tyler Calabresi and a group of educators and students, gathered to talk about finding a way to provide more educational and cultural opportunities for children of color in New Haven.

While he was an undergraduate at Harvard, Fernandez worked as a student director in a program that had “a very robust set of camps and after school programs in the neighborhoods around Boston.” When he arrived at Yale for law school, he joined with the community activists to create a similar opportunity for young people, and LEAP was born.

Across 30 years, LEAP has grown so that it now serves 1,000 young people each year, offering after school and summer programs including literacy activities, swim lessons, coding, camping, dance, yoga, athletics, and gardening among many other activities. “Our organization’s core mission is training leaders and educating kids,” Dr. Milstein Meyer said.

Having a program that is essentially run by young people “is a big part of our success,” Fernandez said. “At each stage young people can participate in leadership roles in their community. At seven or eight, they can do a LEAP community service project; at 13, they can be interning with our younger children. At 16, they can come to work for us full time in the summer, being a leader for children in their neighborhoods, and as a 19-year-old college student, we’re giving them a lot of responsibility in our programs. All of our site coordinators started with us as counselors or as children in our programs.”

“We have a 30-year track record and people can see LEAPERS who have gone on to become teachers, doctors, police officers, firefighters, scientists,” Fernandez said. “And young people who started in our program as children are now working for us.”

Cynthia Mann M.D., a pediatrician, a preceptor at the Yale School of Medicine, and a LEAP Board member said she is excited that the scholarship will provide funds to a LEAP counselor each year. “They understand their importance to the children they mentor,” she said. “They are creative and energetic. They teach reading and history and social justice; they dance, and play basketball, and garden with these kids. They grieve loss with some. They teach conflict resolution. Many go on to impressive careers, crediting LEAP with helping them become the people they are.”

“Breaking the cycle of poverty requires self-esteem and imagination and hard work and education,” Dr. Mann added. “Thousands of young people have gone through LEAP since it was founded. Some come, some disappear, some struggle. But some go on to careers they had never imagined when they were young. For those, our program gives them wings. And that is worth everything.”

At LEAP, Annie Veale “was curious about everyone and would ask questions and make children laugh,” Dr. Milstein Meyer said. “LEAP was her family.”

Dr. Mann said Mrs. Veale “made everyone feel important. The beauty of this scholarship to me is that each year we will get to talk about Mrs. Veale and the way she quietly steered the ship.”

Tomi Veale said she is proud of the legacy her mother created. “She lived by putting her community first, and she always wanted to help others to see all the good that’s out here in the world,” she said. “She would be very honored by this.”