Coach’s brand purpose, the Courage to Be Real, champions the power of authenticity through self-expression. This same spirit lives at the heart of the Coach Foundation’s signature initiative, Dream It Real (DIR). In 2018, the Coach Foundation launched Dream It Real as a direct response to the challenges under resourced young people face when pursuing their dreams.
Dream It Real is more than a philanthropic platform, it is a reflection of the brand’s ethos. The Coach Foundation aims to remove barriers, enable equitable access to post-secondary opportunities and foster a community of dreamers for young individuals to close the opportunity gap and increase socioeconomic mobility.
Dream It Real works with nonprofit organizations in the U.S., China, Japan and the United Kingdom to provide scholarships, mentorship and professional development opportunities to young people around the world. The Dream It Real program offers DIR scholars a scholarship towards their education, a Coach employee mentor, and in-person professional development opportunities. To tailor the program regionally, the Coach Foundation works with each NGO partner to build the program based on the education system in each country.
Dream It Real joins young people on their journey to becoming their most authentic selves and making their dreams a reality. At its core, the program equips DIR scholars with the tools they need to ignite their journey into building their confidence and pursuing their dreams.
Since this is a global impact program, the foundation relies on the expertise of the NGOs to understand the way the post-secondary education system was set up to then build a scholarship program that met the needs of the young people in the region.
This creates challenges when trying to show the collective impact of the program since it looks different in each country. We were able to identify universal KPIs that each NGO could track and help us better tell the story of scholar impact. This included tracking each year the number of scholarships awarded, scholars persisting year over year, mentorship hours, and debt accumulation.
In 2018, we set out with a goal to fund 5,000 scholarships by 2025. In 2023, we achieved this goal two years early and set a new goal of 10,000 scholarships by 2030, showcasing our commitment to expanding educational access. We’ve now funded over 7,000 scholarships for young people globally and over the last four years, we funded 250 scholarships each year, matched each student with a mentor at Coach and provided career readiness programming to help their professional development and Coach employees have spent over 6,000 hours mentoring the next generation.Through our programs, students increased their confidence and drive to achieve their dreams by the end of the program.
In 2025, we marked an incredible milestone with our first cohort of Dream It Real scholars in the United States completing the four-year program. Additionally, the Coach Foundation announced a transformative $20M investment to advance opportunities for under-resourced young people who have the courage to make their dreams a reality – nearly doubling its commitment to the North American Dream It Real program by 2030 through multi-year grants to key partners and additional support.
97% of students are on track to graduate college on time compared to the 21% national average for first-generation college students.
94% of Dream It Real scholars are first-generation college students who graduate with 88% less debt than the national average.
250 employees are matched with a mentee and have dedicated over 6,000 hours to supporting the next generation over the last four years.
