THE KENNEDYS

A program more difficult to get into than Harvard 👀. Or Yale.

Giving back has long been a part of Dan Wieden’s legacy. The Kennedys are Exhibit A.

The Kennedys is an intense, advertising school for outsiders — be it outsider skills, outsider immigration status, outsider socio-economic factors. You take these outsiders and instead of them paying some ad school tuition, you pay them a living wage. A radical notion, eh?

There is no standardized curriculum. The Kennedys program is different office-by-office. Within each office, it is different year-by-year. If that all sounds shambolic, that’s because it is. I was fortunate enough to be selected to run Year 3 of the New York office. It was one of the hardest, most rewarding things I’ve done. Not just in advertising, but in my life.

h/t: Kyrik Gaines, Houston Ghasi Trent, Sam Starks, David Zheng, Sophie Bramnick, Henry Wang