EDUCATIONAL EXCELLENCE FOR ALL

Education is the doorway to equal opportunity and self-sufficiency and education in the 21st Century requires a higher bar for what students need to know in order to secure careers with adequate incomes and meaningful opportunities to advance. We believe that all children can succeed at high levels and our country’s aspiration should be to make an outstanding education attainable to all, regardless of zip code. This is the social justice issue of our time and the health and sustainability of our democracy depends on an educated citizenry that have the problem solving, critical thinking and STEM skills necessary to succeed in the new economy. Currently, the US is 31st among the 35 OECD industrialized nations in math competency and 20th in reading. Our children deserve better. Our focus is to:

• Pilot and grow a diverse set of exemplar schools and programs to demonstrate what is possible;
• Identify, pilot and scale innovations with proven results;
• Support a research agenda to confirm and publicize a definition of excellence, best-in-class examples, and effective approaches;
• Launch activities and incentives to seed and build local capacity and interest in successful initiatives.

We are concentrating our work initially in Massachusetts.

RESILIENT FAMILIES

Every child deserves a caring family yet families who face enormous challenges rarely receive the support they need to safely care for their children, leaving too many children at risk of abuse and neglect, a reality we see in our struggling child welfare systems. Our focus is to:

• Scale intensive in-home therapy which restores struggling families and supports troubled youth to effectively keep them safe and out of government custody or when this is not possible, creating alternate positive permanent family options,
• Catalyze system change leading to substantial improvements in accountability, transparency and outcomes of public systems responsible for youth.