Grants for Charter Schools

Who We’re Looking For

We support nonprofit organizations that run some of the top public charter schools in their communities and are redefining what is possible in America’s public schools. Our portfolio members typically share the following traits:

Academic Excellence

They have had strong academic performance for multiple years, as demonstrated by measures such as student academic growth, achievement on state tests relative to peers, sub-group performance and, when available, long-term student outcome data.

Commitment to Financial Stability

They are committed to operating their schools on public funding and will not require significant philanthropy when they finish growing their networks of schools.

Ambition to Grow 

They typically have waiting lists and want to expand their impact by opening more schools. The “Seed” organizations we support seek to open 1-2 more schools within the next two years, while our “Scale” strategy supports leaders who plan to launch 3+ more schools over a five-year period.

Strong Leadership Committed to Underserved Students

School leadership teams have the capacity to build the skills and expertise needed to accomplish their ambitious goals. They share a commitment to serving students who have limited access to high-quality public schools in their communities.

Scale Funding

We are looking for leaders who want to expand their high-performing public charter schools by growing to serve roughly 1,000+ additional students in the next 3-5 years.

What We Offer

Funding

We provide grants and low-interest loans of $750,000+ to help promising public charter schools pursue their multi-year plan to open new schools and increase their impact. Once awarded, these grants and loans are disbursed over a three to five-year period.

Strategic Partnership

We work alongside charter leaders to help them navigate the challenges of growth and deliver for students and families. Our investment and structured finance team members not only bring financial and strategic expertise to their work, but have typically worked in schools and can relate to the experiences of our portfolio leaders.

Community

We build a collaborative community among the nation’s foremost charter leaders and coordinate meaningful opportunities for them to learn from one another. These gatherings include our annual Portfolio Retreat for CEOs, as well as 15-20 smaller convenings every year for senior leaders.

Support, Insights, & Solutions

Through our impact team, we spotlight and share practices that make schools and organizations better. We are willing to invest in scalable solutions and innovations to accelerate performance, and can provide short-term consulting support. Our four practice areas are academics & character, talent; finance & operations, and college access/alumni success.

NOTE: Letters of inquiry are accepted on a rolling basis; there are no deadlines. Please note that we do not seek, and rarely fund, unsolicited grant applications.

Our Goal

American public education prepares all students with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions they need to be active participants in a robust democracy and to be successful in the global economy.  

Read more about the Education Program.

Focus Areas

New Designs to Advance Learning

Our grantmaking funds school- and classroom-based innovations to better support student learning and holistic youth development, with an emphasis on meeting each student’s unique needs, ensuring deep mastery of content and skills, and improving academic outcomes.

Schools today are charged with preparing students to thrive in an increasingly complex world. This extends beyond supporting academic success and includes equipping young people to actively engage in our democracy and workforce. In order to meet this challenge, schools of the future will need to be places where learning is deeply personalized, instruction is focused on mastery of core skills, competencies, and knowledge, and holistic youth development is woven into the student experience. Our investments support schools, school districts, charter management organizations, and other school support organizations in catalyzing and implementing these changes. 

Pathways to Postsecondary Success

We invest to reimagine pathways to educational and economic opportunity for high school graduates. This includes initiatives to improve college access and completion, particularly for low-income and first-generation students, as well as efforts to better align K–12 learning, higher education, and careers.

Given the changing nature of the economy, it is more imperative than ever for students to attain some postsecondary education to thrive in the global economy. This requires American education to collaborate with the labor market in the design of better pathways to opportunity for all students beyond high school graduation. By providing a diversity of options and flexibility necessary to accommodate the range of student needs and ambitions after high school, we can improve outcomes for all students, especially those who have faced historic barriers to opportunity. To meet that need, our grantmaking supports initiatives to improve postsecondary access and completion, and to expand the range of postsecondary pathways available to students, and to ensure that K–12 and higher education collaborate with the labor market to prepare young people for the future of work.

Leadership and Teaching to Advance Learning

We work to ensure that all students benefit from content-rich, standards-aligned instruction by funding efforts to strengthen teaching and school leadership, including the development of high-quality instructional materials and curriculum-based professional learning.

Educators today are tasked with holding all students to high academic standards in mathematics, English language arts/literacy, and science, requiring an increase in both the rigor of instruction and the level of student engagement in order to achieve those expectations. As a result, teachers adapt teaching to meet students’ diverse needs while helping them master the academic content, skills, and habits of mind required for success in school and life. To help educators meet these challenges, the Corporation invests in the development of high-quality instructional materials and curriculum-based professional learning for teachers and instructional leaders. It also supports a wide range of initiatives to advance the knowledge, skills, and practices that educators need to support student success, including clinically rich teacher preparation, coaching and mentoring, and ongoing professional development for teachers and school leaders.

Public Understanding

Our grantmaking aims to build a shared understanding about the changes needed to ensure that all students excel in school and life, including efforts to foster collaboration among families, educators, community leaders, and students as true partners in achieving that vision.

Research shows that students thrive when families have a meaningful role in their education and schools are stronger when they have close ties to their communities. But not all children experience the benefits of strong community and family engagement at their schools. At the same time, the perspectives of families and educators are often neglected when school reforms are being developed and implemented, which can lead to frustrations that compromise the success of those initiatives. Our grantmaking aims to reverse those trends by bringing together families, communities, students, educators, policymakers, and the public in support of an equitable and educational system and high-quality learning experiences for all. These efforts include initiatives to elevate the concerns and priorities of families and educators, empowering them to shape educational policy and practice. We also fund programs to bridge the gap between home and school. This work ensures that all families have access to the information and best practices they need to navigate and support their children’s education and that they are able to act as effective advocates for change. Because we believe an informed public is vital to ensuring educational equity, we also support media organizations to encourage national and local conversations about issues that matter most to families and educators.

Integration, Learning, and Innovation

Our grantmaking is designed to ensure that everyone invested in improving our nation’s schools works together more effectively to design and implement improvement strategies within complex systems. This includes efforts to reduce fragmentation, foster collaboration, and build cultures of continuous learning, as well as sharing lessons learned with the field.

School systems in the United States are exceedingly complex, encompassing great diversity and competing demands. New initiatives are often introduced without engaging the people who will be most affected by them or considering how changes in one area might have ripple effects in others. As a result, the field of education has often struggled to put promising ideas into practice, slowing the pace of progress for students. Two central challenges have been the tendency to design and implement improvement strategies in isolation, and the limited or ineffective sharing of knowledge across the field. The Corporation seeks to change these patterns by catalyzing integrated approaches that are better suited to improving complex social systems. Our grantmaking also supports initiatives to help people in schools, districts, and states learn from one other and from their own work, paying particular attention to creating a collective vision, designing and managing change effectively and inclusively, and fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement.

NOTE: In order to become a TFK agency partner, you and your organization must go through the following steps in the agency application process. The entire process takes between 4-8 weeks.

Who Can Get Tickets?

Tickets for Kids Charities partners with organizations (agency partners) that serve low-income, at-risk children and youth to supplement their existing programming with ticketed experiences.

These programs can include: residential, mentoring, behavioral health counseling, after-school program, summer day camps, and other types of services. TFK ticketed experiences are provided to approved agency partners at no cost to their organizations or clientele.

NOTE: Applications may be submitted at any time during this funding cycle, open from Feb 1 to the deadline above. Please note that applications will only remain active in our system for 90 days, and at the end of this period they will be automatically rejected.

Guidelines

Local Community grants range from a minimum of $250 to a maximum of $5,000. Eligible nonprofit organizations must operate on the local level (or be an affiliate/chapter of a larger organization that operates locally) and directly benefit the service area of the facility from which they are requesting funding.Organizations may only submit a total number of 25 applications and/or receive up to 25 grants within the 2019 grant cycle.

Who We’re Looking For

We support nonprofit organizations that run some of the top public charter schools in their communities and are redefining what is possible in America’s public schools. Our portfolio members typically share the following traits:

Academic Excellence

They have had strong academic performance for multiple years, as demonstrated by measures such as student academic growth, achievement on state tests relative to peers, sub-group performance and, when available, long-term student outcome data.

Commitment to Financial Stability

They are committed to operating their schools on public funding and will not require significant philanthropy when they finish growing their networks of schools.

Ambition to Grow

They typically have waiting lists and want to expand their impact by opening more schools. The “Seed” organizations we support seek to open 1-2 more schools within the next two years, while our “Scale” strategy supports leaders who plan to launch 3+ more schools over a five-year period.

Strong Leadership Committed to Underserved Students

School leadership teams have the capacity to build the skills and expertise needed to accomplish their ambitious goals. They share a commitment to serving students who have limited access to high-quality public schools in their communities.

Seed Funding

We are looking for leaders who want to expand their high-performing public charter schools by serving 250 to 1,000 additional students in the next two years.

What We Offer

Funding

We award general operating grants of between $250,000 and $600,000 to help promising leaders open their next one to three schools. Once awarded, these grants are disbursed over a two- to three-year period.

Early-Stage Support

We support charter leaders in overcoming the common challenges facing schools and networks that are beginning to grow. The targeted support we provide includes business planning, facilities insights, and access to the best resources from the CSGF portfolio.

Cohort-Based Learning

Selected Seed leaders will join a cohort of their peers who lead public charter school networks in the early stages of growth. As a community, they participate in annual events including the Portfolio Retreat and smaller convenings.

Leaders of Color

We seek to significantly expand the impact of public charter schools led by entrepreneurs who have backgrounds similar to those of the students and families they serve. Within each cohort, there are unique learning, support and community-building opportunities, specifically for leaders of color.

NOTE: Submissions are due to ACR no later than 11:59 PM local time of the organization’s legal/main location on the deadlines above. 

JAMS Foundation/ACR Initiative for Students and Youth

The JAMS Foundation/ACR Initiative for Students and Youth provides grant funding for conflict prevention and dispute resolution programs for K-12 students and for adults working with youth populations in ways that directly transfer CRE skills from adults to youth.

Each year, the Association for Conflict Resolution (ACR) and the JAMS Foundation identify specific subject areas seeking to address otherwise unresolved issues and unmet needs of both general and target youth populations, based on current research and feedback from leaders and stakeholders in the dispute resolution and education fields.

Funding contexts for selected subject areas will vary, and may include community-based organizations, alternative education settings (online education, charter schools), after-school programs, court- or juvenile justice-connected programs, as well as programs operating in traditional K-12 school districts.

Once a target subject area has been determined, a Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA) soliciting Initial Project Ideas will be posted on the ACR and JAMS Foundation websites and distributed through other appropriate venues. Following ACR’s review of the Initial Project Ideas received, selected applicants will be invited to submit a full grant proposal for review by ACR’s Grant Review Committee.

All grant inquires and proposals should be directed to ACR. Grant proposals submitted in response to the Notice of Funding Availability will first be reviewed by ACR, with subsequent review and final approval by the JAMS Foundation Board, based on recommendations from ACR and the Board’s own review of top-ranked proposals.

It is anticipated that for each designated subject area, 1-2 applicants will be selected each year to receive Year 1 grant funding of up to $40,000 to support their efforts to develop, refine, or expand programming in that subject area. Grant recipients may also be eligible for Year 2 funding of up to $20,000, contingent upon the satisfactory achievement of Year 1 benchmarks and goals.

Current Areas of Concentration

The 2022 Funding Track will continue and expand the 2021 Funding Focus on conflict resolution education and training for youth to create opportunities to prevent and manage conflict in the following settings:

• Domestic violence shelters
• Homeless shelters
• Foster care
• Youth correctional facilities
• School or after-school programs