From our earliest days, Mott’s work in Flint has embraced the essential role that education plays in shaping the community values, norms and institutions that help people achieve their full potential.

In the 1930s, our founder helped launch in Flint a “lighted schoolhouse” model of community education. The approach brought together multiple partners to provide children, youth and adults with academic and enrichment programs after the day’s last school bell rang. This not only changed the way area residents engaged with their schools, it helped spark an international movement in community education.

Today, ensuring that Flint families have access to a lifelong continuum of high quality learning opportunities is among our top priorities. For example, we’re helping to expand early education programs, particularly for children exposed to lead as a result of the city’s water crisis. We’re also funding a reimagined, collaborative approach to community education that, we believe, ushers in a new era for Flint’s lighted schoolhouse.

Indeed, our longstanding belief in — and commitment to — educational opportunity is reflected in every Mott grant that seeks to help Flint residents succeed in the classroom, the workplace, the community and beyond.

Our grantmaking in this area focuses on three objectives:

Flint K–12 Education

This work seeks to cultivate a strong, sustainable K-12 system that provides local families with high quality educational choices.

We make grants to:

• strengthen the capacity of the Flint Community Schools to help students succeed both inside and outside the classroom;
• help the district work towards long-term financial stability; and
• cultivate throughout the community a range of attractive learning opportunities that meet the diverse needs of K–12 students and their families.

Community Schools

This grantmaking supports the district-wide adoption of a reenvisioned approach to community schools.

Specifically, we make grants that help educators, residents and other area partners work together to create in each school an approach to community education that is responsive to the unique needs and interests — academic, social, recreational and health — of students, their families and neighborhoods.

College, Careers and Connections

This works seeks to ensure that residents have access to multiple educational and career pathways.

We make grants to:

• strengthen the capacity of area colleges and universities to ensure that every resident has the opportunity to pursue a higher education; and
• help unemployed and underemployed residents obtain the job and skills training they need to enter and succeed in the labor market.