Wesley LePatner Foundation Targets 1,000 Leaders in Her Name

Evan LePatner launched a foundation on the first anniversary of his wife's death that aims to develop 1,000 leaders who will put private-sector skills to work for nonprofits and civic institutions. The Wesley Mittman LePatner Foundation debuted its flagship program, Wesley Leaders, with a first class of eight fellows named last Friday. Next year's class will double to 16.

Wesley LePatner ran real estate at Blackstone and led civic boards before a gunman killed her in her Midtown Manhattan office on July 28, 2025. She was 43 and one of four people killed.

Her husband described the moment that produced the foundation at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara on Tuesday. "And it hit me like a freight train after she died that I couldn't let this flame, this fire of a person, just fall to the ground," Evan LePatner said in conversation with Ellie Austin, editorial director of Most Powerful People.

What drove the launch?

In July 2025, Wesley kept raising the same worry with Evan. She ran a Blackstone real estate fund, chaired the firm's Women's Initiative, served on boards from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to UJA-Federation of New York, and was raising two children. She still told him it wasn't enough.

"We kept having this conversation over and over again. And she said, 'I'm not doing enough. I need to do more,'" Evan told the summit audience.

Kathleen McCarthy Baldwin, Blackstone's former global co-head of real estate, worked alongside Wesley at both Goldman Sachs and Blackstone. Wesley spent more than a decade at Goldman Sachs before joining Blackstone in 2014, where she rose to global head of Core+ real estate and CEO of the Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust (BREIT). Baldwin called bringing Wesley to Blackstone one of the best decisions of her career. She said Wesley's business grew to more than $100 billion "from zero a decade earlier."

How does the Wesley Leaders program work?

The program is a two-year accelerator for high-performing private-sector professionals. It is built around what Evan called "the triangle": professional excellence, civic engagement, and philanthropic impact.

Each fellow receives:

• a primary mentor;
• a wider circle of mentors drawn from business, philanthropy, and civic life.

"The idea is we're going to deepen a person who's already exceptional and succeeding, but allow them to do more, take on more," Evan said. "Because we need our best leaders to do more now."

The goal goes beyond board seats. Evan said he wants fellows to be "in the room advising heads of organizations."

What happens next?

The program starts in New York before expanding across the country. Nominations will begin ahead of next year's doubled class of 16 fellows. Evan framed the pace plainly: they will "take it as big and fast as we possibly can handle it."

If the foundation hits its 1,000-leader target, it will multiply by two orders of magnitude the eight fellows it named in its first week — a scaling bet that the model Wesley embodied, excellence plus civic pull, can be taught rather than inherited.