2024
Grants Awarded

Communities United will convene a youth summit in Spring 2025 that will focus on advancing youth-led mental health solutions in Chicago. The summit will address the growing mental health crisis amongst youth and will aim to empower participants to challenge stigma, advocate for systemic changes, and promote community healing.

This one-time grant to the Schuler Scholars Emergency Fund at the Lake County Regional Office of Education will support the nearly 550 current college students who lost scholarship funding when the Schuler Education Foundation abruptly ended its longstanding scholarship program. The funds would help cover tuition gaps, room and board, health insurance, and other emergency expenses for these students.

These funds support the design and dissemination of a large survey, with the larger goal of improving the identification and support of multilingual learners in diverse early childhood settings across Illinois.

The Youth Justice & Power Union (YJPU) is a youth-led organization established in 2011 that focuses on the concerns of youth in Boston. Through YJPU, young people take an active role in decision-making for campaigns and community building, empowering them to address the root causes of systemic issues in their communities through organizing and direct action.

George Lee serves as the Coordinator for YJPU. Lee is a longtime youth organizer in Boston, championing intergenerational movement-building across diverse issues like employment, housing, and community empowerment. Currently leading the adult staff team at YJPU, Lee contributes to various initiatives, including Coalition for a Truly Affordable Boston and Keep It 100 for Egleston. Lee’s journey evolved through youth outreach, neighborhood-based leadership development, and Citywide organizing with organizations like Project HIP-HOP and Beantown Society. He is committed to developing lifelong organizers, winning meaningful changes and investments, and transforming power relationships and deep-rooted, harmful systems.

This grant is given in honor of Jennifer Stone

This grant is given in honor of Jennifer Stone

This grant is given in honor of Michael Conway.

Lawrence Hall is partnering with Chapin Hall to utilize a comprehensive literature review to inform and validate our ongoing approach to foster care services for our LGBTQ+ Young Adults. Through this process, if better practices are identified, we will incorporate those into our model and we will continue those identified as good. Our ultimate goal is to create a program model that can be replicated by other service providers across the country to positively impact the lives of LGBTQ+ Young Adults.

This is a general operating grant.

This grant will support the work of Boston Youth Justice & Power Union, a youth-led organization founded in 2011 to center youth issues, including Black and Brown youth, in the city of Boston.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant will support efforts to provide trainings and technical assistance to youth-led/youth-serving organizations in Philadelphia, expanding their capacity to empower students as change agents and deepening their understanding of the legal solutions available to address educational barriers facing students.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant will support UJIMA, a group of young men of color, ages 14-21, to come together to collectively make a change in their communities, specifically on the issue of their mental health.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant will support youth as they build leadership for healing justice and activism in Chicago Freedom School’s Northstar Liberatory Training Collective and other youth leadership development programs.

This is a general operating support grant.

This is a general operating support grant.

This is a general operating support grant.

The Rapid Response Desk (RRD) leverages the power of collective advocacy to enable 12 aligned organizations to enhance and accelerate their ability to advance policy that improves outcomes for underserved students, including students of color, students from low-income backgrounds, English learners, students experiencing homelessness, students with disabilities, and immigrant students.

This general operating grant to The Education Trust will support its New York and Massachusetts based work.

The Rennie Center will partner with Boston Public Schools to build capacity for practitioner-led improvement across multiple projects, each of which involves supporting student agency and wellbeing. Additionally, we will continue to refine our Rethinking Education policy agenda in collaboration with other education leaders through events and advisory committee meetings.

This a general operating support grant.

This a general operating support grant.

This is a general operating support grant.

NCTR will extend its recent collaboration with Columbia University’s Center for Public Research and Leadership (CPRL), implementing their recommendations to improve NCTR’s data collection tools and processes, refining analysis of BEI grantee data, and improving both communication and programming for BEI programs and the larger NCTR Network.

This is a general operating support grant.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant will allow the Lead Hubs to create and utilize an online, searchable repository for educators to identify research-based strategies around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion that are responsive to their identified needs within their district or school-based equity strategies.

CASEL will examine the role of SEL in developing children’s reading skills and share findings to promote SEL as an evidence-based strategy. This is in response to recent research that indicates lost instructional time has negatively impacted student achievement and deepened disparities in access to high-quality instruction across student subgroups.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant supports a research project providing a mid-implementation progress report for the Student Opportunity Act which will assess how the financial and policy goals of the legislation are proceeding and investigate whether we are generating the information necessary to evaluate the bill upon implementation.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant will increase understanding of and momentum to infuse P-3 content/strategies into principal preparation programs.

This is a general operating support grant for the Center for Study of Child Care Employment.

This is a general operating support grant.

This is a general operating support grant.

This will support a child care movement network that engages partners and stakeholders across policy, research, communications, and organizing to center racial and gender equity in child care in order to create and enact a bold, equitable agenda.

This project builds on and sustains work that helps states, higher education leaders, and advocates advance towards the vision of a diverse, effective, well-prepared, and well-supported ECE profession by developing resources that support equitable access to quality ECE higher education, and by supporting trusting, lasting, and effective family/educator advocacy partnerships.

This grant will support Jumpstart’s workforce development program in San Francisco and the roll-out of its workforce programming to all sites nationally.

Civic Leaders for Illinois Children, a project of the Illinois Network of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, will build policymakers’ and the public’s support for increased investments in high-quality early childhood education, including investments in the early childhood workforce, by elevating the voices of law enforcement and business leaders.

HealthConnect will build an evidence-based case for the value of community-based doula models, promote sustainability for the workforce, and ensure that community-based doulas are included in national discussions with policymakers about their reimbursement, certification requirements, and the diversification and sustainability of the community-based doula workforce.

This grant will support Erikson Institute’s Early Teaching and Learning Academy and Policy and Leadership Department.

This is a general operating support grant.

BUILD Initiative will support Illinois’ leaders in building a high-quality, comprehensive ECE workforce system by assisting cross-agency, public, and private sector analyses of current foundational efforts.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant supports two critical efforts to build understanding and protect high quality SEL: developing a messaging toolkit to increase understanding and strengthen buy-in for SEL across their constituencies, and collaborating with district partners to build understanding of SEL as an integral component of learning and future readiness. These efforts are particularly important at this time, as education leaders are working to embed SEL into the next school year.

Support to assist district and school leaders in providing academic and socio-emotional services to newly arrived multilingual learners. Specifically, the grant will leverage Internationals expertise to develop resources, disseminate toolkits, offer training sessions, and create a curriculum geared towards the professional development of school and district leaders.

This supports the development of resources to support teacher residency programs to become registered apprenticeships.

This grant would support the work to seize a critical window of opportunity to address the teacher shortages in Pennsylvania.

The Rapid Response Desk (RRD) will develop updated recommendations, regardless of outcomes in various elections, for priorities based on the current needs of the students for whom it advocates. The RRD’s work will shape and frame education equity conversations at the federal and state levels, on topics such as accelerated learning, chronic absenteeism, student mental health supports, resource equity, assessments and accountability, and school climate/discipline policies.

This grant would support the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research project to evaluate Whole School Safety in support of a District-wide policy.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant supports the Youth Leadership Development Continuum, a series of after school and summer programs, credit bearing internships, media production, and paid employment that enables young people to advocate for policy and systems change. Its media work and collaborations with other youth serving and social justice organizations is also helping to strengthen the ecosystem of youth activism in Philadelphia.

This is a general operating support grant.

This is a general operating support grant.

This is a general operating support grant with additional support for its role in the Whole School Safety Initiative.

This grant provides general operating support for the Urban Youth Collaborative.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant supports Juvenile Law Center’s Youth Engagement projects that create opportunities for youth with experience in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems to use their personal stories and experiences as a platform for social change in their communities.

The Youth Action Institute (formerly the Youth Justice Board) requests continuing support to examine the experience of safety and dignity for queer and trans youth of color in New York City, and to continue a previous cohort’s work on social media surveillance.

This is a general operating support grant.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant supports the Youth Action Board of the Chicago Continuum of Care.

The Stone Scholarships will support pre-service teachers seeking to influence educational reform within multiple school system levels. Scholarships will be awarded to qualified teacher candidates committed to working in urban schools to provide tuition support, mentoring, professional development, and travel funds.

This grant will support leadership coaching and EdD program improvement to assess, monitor, and continue to deepen the extent to which UIC school leaders are strengthening their ability to diagnose and develop the adult SEL capacity in their schools which will, in turn, strengthen the SEL support for students. In addition, scale up our sharing of strategies and learnings with the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) in a variety of ways that includes but is not limited to: engagement with the Office of Principal Quality, Office of Network Support (ONS), Office of Early Childhood, and most importantly the Executive Director of Social and Emotional Learning in the Office of College and Career Success (OCCS).

The general operating grant will be used to engage and support the work of the Massachusetts Education Equity Partnership (MEEP) – a coalition of civil rights, social justice, and education advocates from across the Commonwealth working together to promote educational equity for historically underserved students in our state’s schools.

This is a general operating support grant.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant will support LPI to expand and strengthen its equity-focused, high-quality educator preparation through the Educator Preparatory Laboratory (EdPrepLab) and to extend on-the-ground community engagement on the implementation of community schools and relationship-centered schools in California through the Shared Learning Initiative.

This is a general operating support grant.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant will launch Cohort 4 of the Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) residency program and continue to secure sustainable funding for the model.

This grant supports the Stone Foundation Fellowships in Early Childhood Development Leadership.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant will support Start Early’s administrative, legislative, and grassroots efforts to advance the early childhood system in Illinois, with a focus on infants and toddlers, children and families in priority populations, and the workforce.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant supports New America’s Early & Elementary Education Policy Program to continue to inject Birth-3rd grade policy ideas into the national education conversation and produce new policy insights to propel B-3rd reforms in states, school districts, communities, and schools.

This is a general operating support grant.

This is a general operating support grant.

This is a general operating support grant.

This is a general operating support grant for T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood National Center.

Advocate Children’s Hospital Healthy Steps Program, in conjunction with Advocate Medical Group, will continue to engage and support physician practices serving socially vulnerable communities to promote effective screening and management for child mental health issues and unmet social needs.

This is a general operating support grant.