Improving Community Education

Education should offer the same pathway to success for youth in low-income communities that it does for their more affluent peers. This means achieving steady academic and developmental growth; helping students finish school with sufficient skills to enter any of several doors to adulthood, including college, without remediation; and closing achievement gaps that reflect the failure of many school districts to serve adequately their poor and minority students.

Funding priorities for Community-Driven Reform

Community-driven school reform strategies enable community members to identify the reasons their students are not achieving; propose solutions; and advocate for meaningful change in local schools and school districts. These strategies increase the likelihood that the changes being implemented are appropriate to the needs of the schools and students, and are sustainable.

Grantmaking is designed to build upon promising practices of community-driven school reform that lead to sustainable increases in academic achievement at all grade levels for all students, especially the traditionally underserved. Specifically, we are interested in initiatives that study, distill and disseminate effective reform strategies across multiple schools within a district. We also consider projects that create district- and state-wide collaborations aimed at strengthening educational policies and school funding.

We also support programs that strengthen community-driven reform through technical assistance, training and research.

Click here to view the 10 most recent grants for this program area.

Funding priorities for Vulnerable Youth

Creating pathways to economic security, self-sufficiency and adulthood is crucial for young people who have dropped out of school, are struggling to stay in the classroom and/or are disconnected from important public support services. Community colleges, employment training programs, and education and workforce policymakers and practitioners must begin to address the educational and employment challenges of this population.

Grantmaking supports the development and expansion of strategies, programs and policies that help reconnect dropouts and struggling students with opportunities to earn a diploma, develop employment-related skills and access supports to aid their transition to adulthood.

Specifically, we are interested in initiatives that:

raise the visibility of the dropout crisis;
strengthen the capacity of youth-serving organizations to advocate for the needs of vulnerable youth;
develop, identify and disseminate promising practices that support this population; and/or
re-shape policies across systems (i.e., education, workforce and public care) that serve these youth and increase their educational achievement and opportunities.

Because racial disparity characterizes many of the policies and practices serving vulnerable youth, proposals should incorporate strategies to address institutional racism.

Click here to view the 10 most recent grants for this program area.

Funding priorities for Learning Beyond the Classroom

Learning beyond the classroom can provide academic support and opportunities for children and youth to participate in stimulating activities, experiences and mentoring.

In January 1998, we entered into a private/public partnership with the U.S. Department of Education focused on the 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLCs) initiative. This initiative's goal is to provide quality afterschool programming for low-income rural and urban children in thousands of schools across the country. Central to the initiative's design is the concept that schools partner with community-based organizations and other local institutions to provide broader learning opportunities.

Grantmaking builds on the opportunities presented by our involvement in the 21st CCLC initiative, as well as on other major state and national projects that engage local communities in increasing and improving afterschool learning opportunities. Specifically, our funding is directed at capacity-building, including training, technical assistance, research, evaluation, policy development and building public support for afterschool programs. (We do not fund the operation of individual afterschool programs.)

Our first funding strategy is to generate and disseminate information about promising practices and programs focused on improving outcomes for children and youth. Grantmaking seeks to cultivate, capture and share the most effective expanded learning opportunities, and includes research and evaluation of 21st CCLC and other afterschool initiatives, as well as professional development opportunities for afterschool practitioners.

The second strategy is to increase the sustainability of afterschool programs though policy development, communications, advocacy and support for communities. Grantmaking focuses on afterschool programs as a means toward expanding and sustaining community/school partnerships in support of improved outcomes for children and youth. Grants are clustered in:

policy development and advocacy -- helping decisionmakers develop and implement local, state and national afterschool policies that emphasize sustainable systems of support; and
communications -- building public awareness about the importance of expanded resources for afterschool programs and raising public will to support them financially.

Click here to view the 10 most recent grants for this program area.

We strongly suggest that organizations seeking funding from this program carefully review all program guidelines in this section and our application procedures.