Donald L. Hense, lHense is the founder and board chairman of the Friendship Charter Network, the largest African-American-led charter school network in America. Hense’s accomplishment is significant, because, while over 80 percent of charter school students are Black or Latino, fewer than 10 percent of charter schools are founded and led by Blacks or Latinos, according to a study by the Brookings Institute.
Three-quarters of the students enrolled in Friendship schools in D.C. are from Wards 7 and 8, the city’s two poorest areas, and nearly all are African-American. Their achievement is reflected in their continuous improvement on standardized tests. Most recently, Hense and his team celebrated, when five of Friendship’s 12 D.C. schools were rated Tier 1 by the Public Charter School Board – the highest of three ratings a charter school can earn.

As a native of St. Louis and graduate of Morehouse College and Stanford University, Hense has long understood the power of a quality education. But for years he had no interest in working in K-12 education. He was serving as executive director of Friendship House Association, a non-profit serving low-income families in Washington D.C., when he was approached by an executive from a local charter operator about using Friendship House to charter a school. After some reflection, he agreed to transfer his experience fighting intergenerational poverty to the fight for quality public education.

Hense made history as the first African American to win a grant from New Schools Venture Fund, which supports charter school founders. Friendship was among the first group of schools chartered by the D.C. Public Charter School Board in 1998. Twenty years later, it has12 campuses for students in grades Pre-K3 to 12 in D.C., an online school, and schools in Baton Rouge, La., Baltimore, Md., and Little Rock and Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
Donald serves as chairman of the Center for Youth and Family Investment, which provides extended learning programs to more than 2,000 children daily. He also co-founded the Bridges to Friendship Initiative, which spurred the Navy Yard revitalization and was recognized by Vice President Al Gore as a model community initiative.
Donald has served as vice president of the National Urban League, director of development of the Children’s Defense Fund, and director of governmental relations at Howard University, Boston University and Dartmouth College. He is a board member of the Center for Education Reform and the D.C. Arts and Humanities Collaborative and is treasurer of the D.C. Association of Charter Schools. In 2011, Donald was inducted into the National Charter Schools Hall of Fame.
Donald received his B.A. from Morehouse College and attended graduate school at Stanford University. He was a Rockefeller intern in economics at Cornell University, a Merrill scholar at the University of Ghana, a Ford Foundation fellow at Stanford University and a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.