Giving

The Verrazzano Honors Program, unique to the College of Staten Island, serves over 300 motivated, high-achieving students and supports their academic and social development. This selective program challenges students academically and provides them with opportunities to extract all they can from their college experience. This includes attending professional development workshops, committing to community service, attending extracurricular activities that expose them to new ideas and perspectives, and completing a capstone project that highlights what they have learned at CSI.

Verrazzano students come from all the public and private high schools on Staten Island, and we recruit from all the boroughs, upstate New York, and New Jersey. They are significantly involved in clubs, sports, extracurricular activities, and much more. They are largely working class, but still find time to give back; from 2015-2020, they completed almost 20,000 community service hours working with schools, hospitals, libraries, and a variety of non-profit organizations in the New York City area. Almost 80% of students in the program graduated in four years—over 4% graduate in fewer than four years. And nearly 70% graduate at least cum laude.

We hope to raise $7,000 to support student internships in community service, professional development, and social media; fund unique extracurricular trips to explore New York City; and to continue offering our fun-team building orientation for all new students.

We invite you to join us in sponsoring a gift to honor the life of Debbie Mahoney, an integral member of our CSI family, whose loss we mourn but whose life we wish to celebrate with a campus bench inscribed in her name. 

We will also contribute a second bench to honor the legacy of all of our students and members of the CSI community who have been vastly impacted by the pandemic.  As a special pledge, our President, Dr. William J. Fritz will generously match gifts made in honor and recognition of appreciation of the CSI commitment reflected in the lives of Debbie and those endeared members of our community.

The College of Staten Island has received a $7.5M cash gift from Class of ’65 alumni Lucille and Jay Chazanoff to benefit the School of Business. The gift is the largest individual donation ever made to a nonprofit within the Borough of Staten Island. With the potential to dramatically transform the work of the School, the Fund will be used to support the Lucille and Jay Chazanoff School of Business, including accreditation pursuant to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) – an international organization that is the preeminent accrediting body for business schools in the United States. There are 845 business institutions in 56 countries and territories that have earned AACSB accreditation.

Eye on CSI is a publication of the College of Staten Island, provided to alumni and friends of the College and its predecessor institutions, Staten Island Community College and Richmond College."