Founded in 1998 by two Yale undergraduates who perceived a lack of interaction between members of the university community and residents of the New Haven neighborhood in which Yale’s main campus is located, NSP is the nation’s only year-round, student-led volunteer service organization dedicated to helping underprivileged individuals and families obtain the resources they require to become self-sufficient.

NSP reaches out to those in need via a national network of 15 drop-in resource centers. These offices, staffed full-time by student volunteers from area colleges and universities, pick up where official social service organizations leave off. Trained NSP volunteers work one-on-one with their low-income (and often homeless) clients to ensure that they have access to assistance and resources in critical areas such as housing, employment, health care, child care and legal aid.

Yet helping people – important though that is – constitutes only part of NSP’s total mission. Its other and no less important goal is to make a difference in the lives of the young people who are actually doing that helping. In tapping their boundless energy and channeling it into selfless acts of public service, NSP helps its student volunteers achieve an enhanced degree of personal maturity and further develop their innate potential as socially conscious leaders of tomorrow.

This simple yet far-reaching concept – the power of the individual to make a difference for the good – stands at the very core of NSP’s vision, and that of its energetic young founders, Kirsten Lodal and Brian Kreiter. It is a vision that National Student Partnerships shares with The Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation, which is proud to be counted as a supporter of this innovative, effective and growing organization dedicated to serving the needy by bringing out the very best in America’s college students.