New Orleans has spent two decades living inside one of the country’s most watched experiments: a post-Katrina ecosystem built largely on charter schools and a constant undertow of urgency.
The system moves fast because it must. And because it moves fast, it asks a lot of the people inside it. That’s the part an organization founded in …… called Lift All Boats aims to make less precarious.
The young nonprofit (known by the shorthand “LAB”) focuses on a deceptively unflashy constraint: leadership capacity.
In January, Lift All Boats became one of the most visible signs of local confidence in that mission when it caught the attention of the Pro Bono Publico Foundation, the charitable arm of the Rex Organization. Created after Hurricane Katrina, the foundation has distributed more than $16 million to area nonprofits focused on improving schools and education since 2006.
Pro Bono Publico is distributing more than $1.3 million in grants for 2025-26 to 77 local organizations, with longer term funding promised in three strategic grants aimed at addressing “more pressing challenges and high-leverage opportunities.” One went to Manning Family Children’s Hospital’s ThriveKids program, which received $50,000 as part of a two-year, $125,000 grant; another went to New Schools for New Orleans, which received $100,000 as part of a three-year, $300,000 grant.
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Benjamin Marcovitz | Executive Director[/caption]
The third strategic grant, and the largest, was awarded to nonprofit newcomer Lift All Boats, which received $100,000 this year as the first installment of a three-year, $400,000 strategic grant.
The idea, put simply, is that creating better leaders will lead to better schools.
“Sustainable improvement in education starts with strong institutions and strong leaders,” noted J.P. Hymel, board member of the Pro Bono Publico Foundation. “The Pro Bono Publico Foundation is proud to support Lift All Boats as it builds permanent, internal leadership pipelines that will continue developing educators long after the program ends. This investment reflects our commitment to measurable results and to strengthening the long-term future of New Orleans schools.”
While the organization may be new, its two leaders have spent years working in the region’s educational system.
Benjamin Marcovitz, the organization’s executive director, previously founded Collegiate Academies, a network of public high schools in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and has spent years coaching leaders across education and nonprofit sectors.
Aidan Kelly, Lift All Boats’ program director, served as Collegiate Academies’ chief academic officer and led post-pandemic reopening efforts while overseeing academic growth across multiple campuses.
Both are passionate about tackling the leadership gap that exists in New Orleans’ educational system but acknowledge that finding support to fill that gap can be challenging. Establishing a strong leadership pipeline doesn’t make headlines the way a new building or a new program might. Yet in its absence, no organization can reach its potential.
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Aidan Kelly | Program Director[/caption]
What did it mean to you (personally and professionally) to be selected for support by Pro Bono Publico?
Aidan Kelly: It’s really exciting that Pro Bono took a chance on us as a new organization and believed in the vision. But it’s also a validation of the work we’ve been doing for years in New Orleans. Ben founded Collegiate Academies in 2008, I joined in 2010, and we did this kind of work there, developing leaders. With Lift All Boats, we’ve been able to do that same thing for others.
Benjamin Marcovitz: I’ve had this tension in my professional life for a while. I started in public education in New Orleans, and I’ve watched how the business sector thinks about talent and succession. In a lot of organizations serving kids, leadership development is not treated like essential infrastructure — it’s treated like a luxury.
When I got the announcement, I felt particularly fulfilled because I’m often waiting for people in the business sector to recognize how important this is for the education sector. I’m not always clear that there is that understanding. So, it was enormously validating to see business leaders recognize that education infrastructure should be strengthened in this way.
How did Lift All Boats come about?
BM: I used [our leadership content resources] a lot at Collegiate Academies, and other networks would ask for the curriculum. I’d tell them, ‘If you teach leadership skills you’re not going to model on Monday morning, it could actually be worse for you.’
The response was then, “I’d like you to teach it to us.” That’s what started Lift All Boats.
Aidan and I grew ourselves with this content, and the conversations we can have about improving it and adapting it are deeper and more nuanced than I’d have with someone else. What I suspected has come to pass: Aidan makes it better than I could have imagined, and now I’m learning from him. It’s also been a lot more fun to do it with him.
AK: Ben has been a mentor and leader for me for 17 years. This is the most effective thing I’ve ever been able to share with people. It helps everyone in different ways depending on what they’re facing. Getting to provide it and share what worked for us and for kids here in New Orleans is the absolute best.
For those who are not familiar with education systems: What is the “leadership training gap” you are trying to fill?
BM: A lot of school improvement is a leadership capacity problem. New products and technologies can help students, but only with strong leaders driving implementation. Every school wishes it had a bench of great leaders, and so many don’t.
There’s also a tendency for organizations serving kids directly to focus on immediate needs, which makes sense. But if you don’t build internal pipelines, you end up in a cycle where leadership turnover resets the work. We don’t think we can be the infrastructure for everybody, but we believe everybody deserves to think about leadership with the ambition and foresight that a Fortune 500 business would bring to talent development.
We help organizations develop those internal pipelines.
AK: And in day-to-day reality, what that means is: generating student results requires lots of skilled leaders. It takes people who can set goals, organize adults, monitor what’s working, respond to problems and still keep kids at the center.
What training and support is currently available to school leaders?
AK: The typical school leader in New Orleans has likely had development from a number of places — a master’s degree, a certificate program, an apprenticeship. And there’s a strong informal mentorship system here: Many school leaders who persist in the role have someone, within their network or outside it who helps them along.
Where it splits is the leaders under the school leader: assistant principals, directors of curriculum and instruction, deans. They’re often new to the role and selected because they were excellent classroom instructors. So, you remove your best teacher and put them in a leadership position without training for that job.
There aren’t really programs that teach you how to be the dean of students at a school. A school of, say, 700 students has five or six essential mid-level leaders whose work does not overlap. Each role requires technical skills and people skills every single day or the school just doesn’t work.
Lift All Boats trains that level, and we also help schools build resiliency by developing multiple people around each role, so if someone leaves, a school is not left to start from scratch.
The pandemic was a tough time for schools. What did that period teach you about leadership?
AK: During the pandemic, schools were maxed out. The ones that were most successful at maintaining student achievement were those that had lots of leaders, not only the principal. They had people throughout the school who could do what leaders do: set goals, organize the efforts of adults, monitor data, and make sure students are seen and loved and have their needs met so they can flourish.
I was chief academic officer of a network of high schools then, and it was tremendously hard. I felt all the time like I was failing. I would talk to people in similar roles, and we’d compare notes — open roles, staff shortages, disruptions — and you’d realize some places had even fewer people with the capacity to lead through chaos.
The investment we had made in leaders didn’t make that time easy, but it meant we had more adults who could keep our focus on kids even as everything was happening. I want that for every school leader, in New Orleans and beyond.
BM: There’s no replacing human connection, and leadership is the infrastructure that protects that connection when circumstances change.
One unique facet of education in New Orleans is its charter ecosystem. How does this element shape what LAB aims to accomplish?
BM: Post-Katrina, the landscape became essentially an all-charter ecosystem, and it created an incentive to collaborate more. When I was a leader in that sector, we would call each other up for anything we needed. We’d form a team collectively against bureaucracies that had failed the system before, and as a result, we were able to remove a lot of challenges for students and families.
In other cities with robust charter sectors, it can be the opposite: Leaders worry about approaching each other’s people; they don’t enter into conversation. That’s not what I’ve experienced here.
For our work, that collaborative vortex matters because leadership pipeline work depends on trust, the ability to talk openly about talent, development and long-term health. Without that, it falls flat. And even then, a major barrier is cost. Pro Bono is helping with that.
On LAB’s website, it notes that participating principals and CEOs have used LAB skills to improve hiring. What does that look like on the ground?
AK: We think hiring and selection, not only hiring from outside, but selecting internally, is so important. One example we talked about is making the hiring process more real and more aligned to what the job actually is.
If a school’s culture involves kids being outside, playing in nature, learning in a hands-on way, then the hiring process should include that, not just sit-down questions. It gives you more data on whether candidates interact with kids the way you want. And it tells the candidate, concretely: ‘If you work here, it’s like this every day. If you love that, great. If you don’t want to be wet or dirty, then it’s not the school for you.’
We’ve found that partners see that when people join the team they’re better prepared because they know what they’re heading into.
A lot of nonprofits talk about “scaling.” You both talk about something slightly different: building systems that reduce dependency on you. Why is that important?
AK: We say all the time: When you leave Lift All Boats, we hope we hear from you. We’d love to be helpful, but we don’t want you to need us anymore. We’re not hoping to be contracted year after year for the core product. That would be a sign we failed.
When leaders design their internal programs, and we help them launch, once those programs are running, they should work. Then you build your own leaders. And you make it authentic to your staff, your students, your families, your community in a way that lasts.
BM: That’s the hope, a multiplier that becomes self-sustaining.
If this Rex-backed grant delivers everything you want it to, what does New Orleans look like five years from now?
AK: We want every school in New Orleans to have the same leadership depth, so there are a lot of people preparing to do the work. That means every day, leaders walk into the building with a sense of peace because they know they have people who can help them handle challenges, both expected and unexpected.
And when they look into the future, they have peace because they can say, in five years, in 10 years, I don’t know exactly who will be in these roles, but I know they’ll be amazing because we’ve built the bench.
We also want to keep scaling. We’re already working in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Washington state, Washington, D.C., and Milwaukee, and we want to bring this to a bunch of other places, especially places without the resources that some major markets have.
BM: And I think specifically we want it to be offered at the same level across different school types, not just charters. There’s no reason it couldn’t be for traditional public schools, private schools, all of it. Introductory costs are often the barrier, and organizations like Pro Bono can nudge schools past that so they can build something sustainable long-term.
Do you have your sights set on any specific region next?
BM: We’d like it to be across the country, honestly, and maybe not limited there. Our approach has been “coalition of the willing” first: whoever is eager to work with us. That’s why the list of places is kind of ragtag and all over the place; those are the folks most excited to jump in. We know no bounds otherwise, and we’d love for anyone interested to reach out.
In a lot of organizations serving kids, leadership development is not treated like essential infrastructure — it’s treated like a luxury.
– Benjamin Markovitz, executive director, Lift All Boats
