$11 million gift from Keith Mardak and Mary Vandenberg will underwrite 500 new scholarships and comprehensive support packages for local low-income students

Milwaukee’s next generation of college graduates just got a powerful new set of patrons, as longtime arts and youth benefactors Keith Mardak and Mary Vandenberg commit an $11 million gift to All-In Milwaukee, the largest in the college-access nonprofit’s history.

The pledge, structured over a decade, will fund 500 new scholarships and comprehensive support packages for local low-income students, building on the couple’s decades of giving to youth and the arts and making a sustained investment in Milwaukee’s future workforce and civic leadership.

The gift represents a new chapter for Mardak, the former chief executive and chairman of Milwaukee-based sheet music publisher Hal Leonard, and Vandenberg, the company’s former vice president of business affairs, who have quietly become two of the region’s most influential private donors to young people and arts education.

Their philanthropy has helped reshape key cultural and youth institutions, from the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee to the Milwaukee Youth Arts Center and First Stage, where multimillion‑dollar contributions have funded facilities, programs and expanded access for children across the city. With All-In Milwaukee, they are now extending that continuum of support into the college years, explicitly tying their giving to the question of who gets to complete a degree—and who gets left behind.

In a statement, the couple said they were drawn to All-In Milwaukee’s “comprehensive, wraparound support” model, which braids scholarship dollars with advising, mentoring, and career-development help rather than focusing solely on tuition assistance.

That approach mirrors the philosophy behind much of their earlier philanthropy, which often paired capital gifts with investments in programming and student services, such as academic support hubs at the Boys & Girls Clubs and expanded rehearsal and performance spaces at the Milwaukee Youth Arts Center.

For Mardak and Vandenberg, writing a large check is only part of the equation; the more critical piece is ensuring the organizations they back can surround young people with enough guidance and opportunity to alter life trajectories, not just balance sheets.

All-In Milwaukee’s model effectively builds on that premise, operating as a college-completion and career-readiness program for high-potential, limited-income and largely first-generation students from the city.

The organization works in partnership with a network of Wisconsin colleges and universities, securing maximum financial aid packages from those schools and then layering on roughly $12,000 per student through donor funding to cover the non-negotiables that often derail low-income students: laptops, summer credits, unpaid internships and unexpected costs.

Each scholar is paired with an advisor or mentor who tracks their progress term by term, offers academic and career counsel, and helps navigate everything from course selection to networking, reflecting the kind of personalized support many first-generation students cannot find at home.

The results have made All-In Milwaukee an increasingly attractive vehicle for donors who want measurable impact. The program reports that about 90 percent of its scholars either graduate within six years or remain on track, a rate that substantially outpaces national outcomes for low-income students and Pell Grant recipients.

Roughly 84 percent of participants finish their degrees with no student loan debt, and a large majority stay in Wisconsin after graduation, many moving into fields—such as nursing, business and STEM—where regional employers face persistent talent shortages.

For a city still grappling with racial and economic disparities in educational attainment, those numbers have underscored the program’s potential to seed a more diverse middle class, a mission the couple has increasingly embraced in their giving.

Mardak and Vandenberg’s $11 million gift will be deployed with a particular focus on students coming from the institutions they know best: Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee, Carmen Schools of Science and Technology, Dr. Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy, and Milwaukee Academy of Science, which are public charter or charter-like schools serving predominantly low-income students of color. Their prior gifts to those organizations have funded everything from a dedicated academic support center at the Boys & Girls Clubs to a $5.25 million commitment to Dr. Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy, enabling a new middle school and state-of-the-art recording studios.

Channeling All-In Milwaukee scholarships toward graduates of these pipelines effectively extends the couple’s earlier investments, creating an arc of support that can carry a young person from elementary enrichment and arts programming all the way through a bachelor’s degree.

Inside All-In Milwaukee, the gift lands at a moment of rapid growth. The nonprofit launched with just 40 students in its inaugural class and now supports more than 600 scholars across partner campuses, with annual cohort sizes steadily increasing.

In the coming academic year, All-In Milwaukee expects to send more than 200 new students to college and has set its sights on enrolling 250 students per class by 2029, a scale that would make it one of the most significant local levers for improving college-completion rates among low-income Milwaukee graduates. Executive director Allison Wagner has described the Mardak–Vandenberg commitment as “transformational,” noting that the couple’s pledge effectively locks in funding for a portion of each cohort over the next decade and provides a crucial foundation for the organization’s next phase of expansion.

The demand, however, still outpaces the supply of funded slots—a reality that helps explain why donors like Mardak and Vandenberg are increasingly vital to the model. In the latest application cycle, only about a third of eligible students could be accepted, leaving hundreds of qualified young people—many with the grades and financial need All-In Milwaukee targets—without access to the program’s support.

For philanthropists who have watched talented students stumble over financial or logistical barriers just short of a diploma, those numbers provide both urgency and a kind of philanthropic leverage, turning each funded spot into a nearly guaranteed degree and, by extension, a higher-earning, more economically secure adult in the region.

For Mardak and Vandenberg, the gift also reflects a personal evolution from arts-focused philanthropy to a broader focus on educational and economic mobility, even as they continue to invest heavily in music and theater. Over the past decade, the couple has endowed rehearsal halls, performance venues, and arts education programs while also supporting high-performing urban schools, faith-based academies, and comprehensive youth-serving organizations, often providing lead gifts that unlock additional funding.

In interviews about their giving, they have emphasized a desire to be close enough to organizations to understand their models and results, a pattern that aligns with their decision to support All-In Milwaukee only after watching its early cohorts progress and its outcomes solidify.

As All-In Milwaukee approaches its 10-year mark, the couple’s donation is likely to carry symbolic as well as financial weight, signaling to other local philanthropists and corporate partners that the program’s mix of high-touch advising and targeted financial aid has matured into a proven civic asset.

Wagner and her team are preparing a new strategic plan that will look beyond the 2029 enrollment goal, exploring how the model might scale further within Milwaukee—or even potentially inform similar efforts in other Wisconsin communities—without compromising the close-knit advising relationships that underpin its success.

For now, the immediate impact of the Mardak–Vandenberg gift is both simple and profound: over the next decade, 500 additional Milwaukee students will have a realistic, supported path to a debt-free degree because one couple decided that the city’s young people were the most important investment they could make.