The Mission
Children across South Carolina deserve a quality education regardless of where they are born and raised. The Original Six Foundation works to improve education by identifying gaps and filling them through hands on engagement and resources.
The Foundation’s Story
The Original 6
The Foundation functions as a resource to build bridges now for a better quality of life tomorrow for the residents of the communities that we serve. As she took office in 2011, Governor Haley sensed that many individuals and organizations wanted to assist South Carolina’s neediest communities, but they needed guidance to unite their efforts to make the biggest impact with their time, talents and treasures. She created the Foundation in 2011 to serve as a non-partisan facilitator, catalyst and funding mechanism to unite these efforts to improve these communities.
Each community initiative is unique in its initiation, strategy, funding, duration and participants. The Foundation works to identify the greatest areas of need in each community that it serves by initially convening a meeting of business and community leaders as well as non-profit service providers and other community stakeholders. These “Leader Meetings” allow the Foundation to fulfill its role as non-partisan facilitator for all of those present to discuss, debate and outline the areas that each participant sees as those with the greatest need or that will have the greatest impact on the community.
Once the initiatives are prioritized, the Foundation’s Board of Trustees affirms that the initiatives identified align with the Foundation’s mission to improve the community in the areas of education, quality of life and workforce readiness. The Foundation then fulfills its roles as catalyst and funding mechanism to ensure that the priorities identified are addressed and that leaders in the community are identified to champion those priorities. Once this leadership has been established and the goals have been met, the Foundation then transfers ownership to those leaders.