When Kenneth Schneider created The Apogee Foundation, no one (except Schneider) could foresee the historic impact it would have on fostering creative excellence worldwide.
The term "apogee" means "the highest point, the culmination," and a better description could not be found for what The Apogee Foundation seeks to inspire and to attain in its mission to discover, develop and celebrate creative excellence around the world.
Apogee’s founder, Kenneth Schneider, was a man respected worldwide as a lawyer, executive, scholar and philanthropist when he spectacularly merged these careers into a new vision for fostering human potential around the globe. Schneider was an international financial expert working in New York, London and Moscow with the world's most prestigious law firms and investment banks when he began applying his unique spectrum of skills to pull the former Soviet Union’s collapsing arts and education systems out of the post-Soviet abyss.
In the years that followed, he employed the same talents that allowed him to rewrite the history of the former Soviet Union's industrial, financial, and governmental institutions to recreate the future of human creativity – and, as a result of his dedication to this mission and the extraordinary group of people whom it drew together, The Apogee Foundation's real world importance has now come to match the name with which the organization was so ambitiously endowed.
The Foundation was originally forged as an East-West venture to bring together the best of what former Cold War adversaries could offer one-another, but it wasn’t long before Ken Schneider recognized that the benefits of this work could be magnified through a multinational, multicultural organization not only enabling but actively cultivating human excellence across borders worldwide: rapidly extending this institution’s and allowing its transformative vision of human possibilities to sweep across the globe.
And now the dazzlingly benevolent vision shared by everyone involved with The Apogee Foundation’s mission is being recognized as an apogee of human excellence, itself. This year, Ken Schneider and The Apogee Foundation were awarded “Top Non-Profit” in a national review of over 10,000 nominees in recognition of their attainment of best practices and highest distinction in their field.
The question now is: how much further can Schneider and this global team of professionals go in inspiring ever-higher levels of human achievement? The one thing we know for sure is that this is only the beginning…