Education is the key to opportunity: Students who receive a quality education are more likely to find rewarding careers and contribute to their communities as adults. High-performing early-learning providers, schools, and colleges contribute directly to academic success. But many children also benefit from high-quality community-based programs that are focused on helping students be successful in school and college. When nonprofits or tribes work in conjunction with education system partners, we frequently see better results for students in school and in life.
We fund collaborations of different scales and sizes here in the Pacific Northwest. We support community-wide planning processes that seek to bring together multiple community organizations and institutions around the educational needs of students. We also fund partnerships between specific educational institutions and community organizations or tribal governments— both existing collaborations as well as planning processes focused on creating an effective collaboration. Our emphasis is on promoting high-quality, well-researched and evaluated programs by community-based organizations and tribes, offered in conjunction with their school or college partners.
Collaborative projects must include at least two distinct entities working together—one being a community organization (or tribe) and the other an educational provider, including early learning providers, K-12 schools or systems, or postsecondary institutions.
Because we feel that close collaborations can yield greater results for students, our funding will prioritize collaborative projects that propose jointly derived goals, ongoing and frequent communication between partners, an investment from both partners, a commitment to collecting and sharing data, and which clearly have all needed partners at the table and committed to the project.
We will fund collaborations in three specific areas:
- Planning processes that help current or prospective partners come together, develop shared vision and goals, conduct research, co-design programmatic efforts, create measurement and data systems, analyze and evaluate existing program data, and create implementation plans. These grants do not include funding for provision of direct services to students. These grants are typically one year or less, under $50,000, and the foundation will consider funding up to 75% of total project costs.
- Supporting scaling up of high quality, proven effective programs run by community-based organizations (CBOs) who partner with an educational institution. Programs need to demonstrate proven results through rigorous evaluations, preferably contrasting program participant results to a set of comparable students (a quasi-experimental comparison group design evaluation). The results seen must be directly related to educational attainment or success in school or college, and we prefer projects that can show a direct connection to a major education system benchmark, such as Kindergarten readiness, reading ability, or high school or college completion, for example. These grants will support both enhancements to collaboration as well as direct services to students. Grants can be up to three years, be no more than $300,000 total; the foundation will consider supporting only up to 25% of the total project costs.
- Supporting evaluation of impact of CBO programs in partnership with education institutions. Because many CBO-offered youth programs have not conducted quasi-experimental comparison group design evaluations, in 2011 the foundation will support a trial project meant to support youth-serving CBOs who are interested in conducting such an evaluation utilizing existing school (or college) partner data. Preferred projects would aim to show a direct connection to a major education system benchmark, such as kindergarten readiness, reading ability, or high school or college completion. The collaboration should have been in place for three years, preferably longer. Projects should focus on a retrospective analysis of student data that would take less than one year to complete; the foundation will consider supporting up to 75 percent of evaluation costs.
Applicants should propose work in only one of the three above areas in their Letter of Inquiry.
A community-based organization, tribe, or educational institution can be the lead applicant for these grants. Letters of support from key collaboration partners are strongly encouraged when organizations submit Letters of Inquiry.
This grant program does not fund teacher professional development, curriculum delivered by teachers, or any instructional costs incurred by education system partners.
