The Albany Free School was founded in 1969 by Mary Leue and a group of parents and students who believed that education should feel like freedom. They built something rare: a school where children were trusted, where their voices mattered, and where the goal was not control, but growth. Together, they named it simply, and boldly, “The Free School.”

What started as a radical experiment became a model for community-based education. Educators, organizers, and families came from across the country to learn from its example. Over the decades, the Free School helped shape a national conversation about how learning could be reimagined. It directly inspired more than a dozen schools and learning spaces across the country and beyond.

But like many institutions, the Free School was not immune to the forces of exclusion, inequity, and inertia. As the neighborhood changed, the school did not. While the surrounding community became predominantly Black and Brown, the student body and board remained almost entirely White. Tuition barriers stayed in place. Local families were often left out. The school, once rooted in revolution, had drifted away from the people right outside its doors.

In 2021, a parent at the school who also served as board president of the Hudson/Catskill Housing Coalition joined the AFS board. The goal was clear: to help stabilize the school and begin the hard but necessary work of rebuilding its relationship with the community. At that time, AFS served as the fiscal sponsor for HCHC. The following year, HCHC secured its own sponsor, and the relationship between the two organizations shifted.

(Click here to learn more about the early beginnings of The Free School.)