New Schools Venture Fund

New Schools Venture Fund partners with innovators in the early stages of developing ambitious new ideas with the potential to dramatically improve student learning and advance equitable opportunity. New Schools prioritizes new, early-stage organizations (which are typically 0 to 2-years old), however will also invest in new initiatives at existing organizations. A new initiative (launched 2020 or after) is a new idea that is launched within an existing organization. A new initiative should represent a novel strategic approach that is distinct from the historic work of the organization. It should be aligned with the organization’s overall mission, and have at least one designated leader who is responsible for executing the idea. New initiatives should have a vision for scale — whether it is growing the number of people you serve, deepening the offerings you provide, or influencing the practice of others.

New Schools Venture Fund is offering a unified application process across four investment areas:

Diverse Leaders: Supporting efforts to increase the number of Black and Latino educators and education leaders, ventures that serve as diversity, equity, and inclusion capacity builders and work to mobilize parents to advocate for change. Interests include:
* Teacher Diversity: Targeting solutions that focus on the recruitment, preparation, and placement of aspiring teachers of color are key to advancing racial diversity within America’s educator workforce. Also seeking ideas that support the retention of teachers of color and center their development and well-being. Funding supports a range of solutions that strengthen the teacher diversity pipeline, from cultivating high school students’ interest in teaching as a profession to providing teachers wraparound services and support.
* Leader Diversity: Ideas that advance leader diversity within schools, districts, and nonprofit organizations. Funding also supports ideas that focus on the continued development of existing leaders of color in education.
* Parent Advocacy and Leadership: Parents of color are key stakeholders and advocates in their children’s education.

Learning Solutions: This focus seeks to support school and school system leaders through providing access to instructional breakthroughs that make learning more equitable and effective. Funding supports the following learning solutions:
* Literacy content and tools: Projects that think in a more integrated way about how tools, content, and teaching practices work together to promote equitable and effective literacy learning experiences for students.
* Whole-school models: Prioritizing a deep investment in whole-school models – bundled instructional resources that help schools reimagine what’s taught, how it’s taught, and the school culture/climate needed to teach it

Racial Equity: This focus invests in promising teams of educators and entrepreneurs with the vision and skills to reimagine learning. The Fund’s Racial Equity funding opportunity will support innovators of color throughout the U.S. with bold ideas to advance racial equity in education. Leaders who meet the following criteria are eligible to apply: 1) identify as a person of color, 2) have an idea focused on advancing racial equity in pre-K-12 education that does not fall into one of the Fund’s three existing investment areas (Innovative Schools, Diverse Leaders, and Learning Solutions), and 3) lead an organization that is in the early stage of development.

EDge Fund: Investing in solutions beyond any single investment area, with a focus on innovations that empower students with learning differences as well as innovations to help schools recover and rebuild from the pandemic.

Amount: $15,000,000 is available to make awards that range from $150,000 and $250,000.

Eligibility: Nonprofit organizations. Organizations must be early-stage or organizations proposing new initiatives (as detailed above).

Link: https://www.newschools.org/apply-for-funding/

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