George Weiss was a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania when his fraternity hosted a Christmas party for 12 inner city kids, a gang called the 12 Apostles. George, 19 at the time, struck up a friendship with the group of 12 year olds, playing basketball and pool with them and listening to stories about their challenging lives. Seven years later, he returned to Penn for homecoming, looked up the group and took them all out to lunch. To his surprise, all 12 had graduated from high school. He was told by one of the kids, “we could not have dropped out and looked you straight in the eye.” Inspired by these words, he promised then and there to make a difference.

And, after building a successful career as a Hartford, Connecticut money manager, he did. The Say Yes to Education program became the realization of George Weiss’ promise in 1987 when he and his wife Diane promised 112 underprivileged sixth-graders from one of Philadelphia's toughest neighborhoods, that if they could make it through high school, he would pay for college.

Since the launch of the Say Yes to Education in 1987, the program has provided educational, social, mentoring and scholarship support to 360 students in three cities and five Say Yes Chapters, three in Philadelphia (Toll, Belmont, and Bryant), and one each in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Hartford, Connecticut. The program’s mission is to combine a scholarship incentive with a comprehensive system of social, educational and psychological support to motivate students to graduate from high school and go on to college.

Today, Say Yes is looking to the future. Its goal is to utilize its experiences and successes to create a model for success in inner-city schools. The program's years of advocacy - along with its research-based approach to improving schools - have yielded rich data that will be used to positively affect the course of urban education reform.