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There are plenty of programs for tomorrow's doctors and lawyers. Our goal is an educated middle class.

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Charity
Mentor
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Mentioned:
UBS
Greenhill & Co.

Article
My Charity : Middle Man

Helping the kids others often overlook

By: Roxanne Downer , Photography by Ian Spanier
Premiere Issue , Page 22

As chairman of the $1.3 billion Manhattan private-equity group Greenhill Capital Partners, Robert Niehaus has made a specialty out of betting on meat-and-potatoes mid-market firms. So it should come as no surprise that Niehaus, 51, has cultivated a two-decade relationship with Student Sponsor Partners.

Founded by Dillon Read (now UBS) investment banker Peter Flanigan, SSP isn’t a particularly glamorous charity. Most of the kids it works with are C students who don’t qualify for magnet or elite prep schools. The colleges most attend (90 percent go on to get undergraduate degrees) tend to be good rather than great.

But according to Niehaus — who now serves as SSP chairman — that’s just the point: “There are plenty of programs for tomorrow’s doctors and lawyers. Our goal is an educated middle class.”

Niehaus sponsored his first student in 1987 after his old Princeton roommate — Flanigan’s godson — told him about the program over brunch. Still a young merchant banker at Morgan, Niehaus got intensely involved in the boy’s life, not only paying his tuition (every SSP mentor signs on to foot a private- or parochial-school bill for four years) but at one point intervening with his principal over a discipline problem.

That kid is now an unemployed former security guard. But others he’s been involved with include a John Deere management trainee, a Credit Suisse junior staffer and one who’s messing with the blueprint and heading to medical school.

Include the students of junior associates, colleagues and golfing buddies, and the success stories are enough to fill a small (middle-class) town. “It’s like anything in life — there are successes and failures. The key is not to dwell on the failures.”

Student Sponsor Partners: 212-986-9575; sspnyc.org