The deadline has passed. Learn about the proposals we accepted!

Deadline: May 2, 2011

The Schott Foundation for Public Education seeks Massachusetts and New York proposals for grants in the following area:

• Messaging, Media, Organizing and Policy recommendations for providing girls of color an opportunity to learn

Background

The Schott Foundation has a long history of working in the gender equity arena, beginning this work over a decade ago with a focus on girls and public school success—to ensure that girls have an opportunity to learn. Most recently Schott co-hosted two girls' equity symposia in New York and Massachusetts to hear from a wide range of stakeholders on the barriers and opportunities facing girls of color in their public schools.

In the past eight years, we have engaged in a significant body of work on the crisis facing Black males. As our most recent report, Yes We Can, demonstrates, the crisis for young Black males is a stunning national tragedy, with graduation rates under 30% in Detroit, Indianapolis, New York City, Baltimore City and many of our major urban centers. A look at the graduation rates for girls of color in these same cities shows that while girls of color are performing marginally better than their male counterparts, the numbers do not demonstrate success by any measure that our nation can be proud of.

Given these realities for young men and women of color in our current educational system, the Schott Foundation recently launched the Opportunity To Learn (OTL) Campaign, which seeks to instill a new framework for systemic education reform. The OTL campaign holds at its core the fundamental value that all children have a right to the four core resources research has shown are needed to give them a fair and substantive opportunity to learn: access to highly effective teachers, early childhood education, college preparatory curricula, and equitable instructional resources. For more information, visit www.otlcampaign.org.

Scope of Work

The Schott Foundation is interested in looking at a range of innovative and creative solutions to highlight potential policy recommendations or other strategies that address girls' unique needs and challenges in the education system—strategies to break what has far too often become a pipeline of school-to-low-wage-work, or, as with their male counterparts, the school-to-prison pipeline. The goal of Schott's Girls Equity work is to ensure that female students of color have a fair and substantive opportunity to learn.

We are seeking creative opportunity to learn strategy proposals to highlight barriers that keep urban girls of color from attaining academic and career success. These proposed projects may be exploring issues of safety that face girls in and out of school; providing high quality education programs to pregnant and teen moms; providing college bound curricula that leads to productive careers; or many others.

The proposal should specifically address some or all of the following components:

• Recommend policies and reforms needed to dismantle the barriers to success for young women of color;
• Identify reforms that states and/or districts can make to provide young women of color an opportunity to learn;
• Recommend tools that can be developed to carry the message about barriers to school success for the education system's most vulnerable young women to educators, parents, foundations and policy makers;
• Discuss the specific needs of immigrant girls and the policies that most impact this population;
• Explore the role that arts, culture, media, activism and other innovative tools play in creating and changing education policy specific to girls;
• Demonstrate how this concept is innovative and transformative to the field; How is this project new and catalytic?

Note: We are looking for systemic solutions. Please make it clear how your proposed project fits within the opportunity to learn frame.

Submitted proposals should be for short term projects to develop the media strategy or policy demand and advocacy strategy. The Schott Foundation is seeking to fund several organizations in New York and Massachusetts. Several grants of up to $25K each will be awarded. We anticipate convening grantees to explore their projects collectively.

Submission

Please submit your proposal via email to nl@schottfoundation.org. All proposals from interested organizations should be submitted by close of business on Monday, May 2, 2011.

Application Materials:

• Project description, no more than five pages;
• Full demographic information and qualifications of key staff involved in the project;
• Proposed project budget and an organizational budget;
• A letter from the IRS certifying the non-profit, tax exempt status of the organization or its fiscal sponsor.

Thank you for your interest in Schott's Girls Equity work.

Click here to download the RFP as a PDF.