Field Building Grants
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.

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.

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.

Communities United’s youth-led program, VOYCE, will work to expand and embed proven school safety practices in Chicago Public Schools through youth-led activities planned for early 2024, including a Citywide youth town hall and engagement of recent refugee/newcomer students and families.

Dual language programs benefit all students and, when appropriate, can be a bridge for newly arrived immigrant and refugee children. Given recent time-sensitive legislation along with the growth in immigrant/refugee children, this effort will support the promotion of dual language programming throughout the state, provide wide-reaching issue education for practitioners to support newcomer students, and highlight specific cases where subsets of immigrant and refugee children benefit from dual language programming.

The Center for the Study of Child Care Employment is seeking support for the purpose of providing content expertise and technical assistance to a Massachusetts-based community working group, hosted and facilitated by Strategies for Children, towards developing and advancing a path towards wages and benefits for early childhood educators in Massachusetts.

UIC will develop a series of policy briefs to inform decisions on how best to use recently approved historic early childhood funding to build a steady supply of quality workforce in Illinois.

In partnership with Chicago Public Schools, Communities United will engage youth and communities in developing plans for creating safe, inclusive, and supportive learning environments.

Council for Strong America will launch a social media campaign segment as part of a strategic communications campaign to educate on the need for and importance of early education and care.

Through this project, Erikson will build faculty capacity across the state (IL) and two-and-four-year higher education institutions to prepare the early childhood workforce to effectively serve young, bi/multilingual children.

To provide current, culturally, and linguistically appropriate and accessible information on COVID-19, vaccination and national and state regulations, relevant to families.

Illinois Action for Children is seeking support to accelerate its work in bringing feedback from early childhood educators and early childhood teacher-prep faculty into policy changes being decided in the IBHE strategic planning process.

Internationals will develop and disseminate recommendations to support multilingual learners as schools and districts plan for re-opening.

Philadelphia Student Union in partnership with Resolve Philly will build awareness of the need for adequate and fair funding in Pennsylvania in tandem with the current state trial.

The Rennie Center supports work to transform education by leveraging the assets and power of communities to build a new vision of high-quality, liberated learning for all students.

Start Early will support the capacity of the U.S. Department of Education to create supportive relationships with and between the organizations, communities, states and families that make up the early childhood landscape, leading to better programs and policies for young children across America.

In early education advocacy, representation matters. This project will launch the inaugural cohort of an early education and care Speakers’ Bureau – a diverse cohort of emerging leaders from the field, whom we will prepare and support to successfully represent our field in public speaking, with the media and advocacy.

This is a field building grant to support the Latino Policy Forum (Forum) in the creation of resources and materials to provide existing community-based early educators with introductory competencies in how to serve young English Learners (ELs).

This is a field building grant to support the dissemination of findings from the evaluation of the Black Educator Initiative in an effort to promote promising policies and practices for diversifying the national teacher workforce.

Over the next six months, New America will be working to identify best practices for children with learning differences and Dual Language Learners (DLLs) and will recommend aligned policies and practices that can be embedded in Pre-K-3rd grade, with an emphasis on kindergarten. These recommendations will then be used to inform the U.S. Department of Education’s Pre-K-3rd strategy, policies, and resource allocations to better support young DLLs and children with disabilities.

This grant will support convenings that will support education leaders who want to explore new ways of supporting students post-COVID-19.

This grant will document the development and impact of the 9:30 Call for early education Massachusetts.

This grant will support the engagement of State Institutes of Higher Education partners to review and develop actionable steps to prepare the Early Childhood Workforce in Pennsylvania.

Illinois Action for Children will provide training and technical assistance to help child care providers apply for the state’s upcoming Strengthen and Grow grants opportunity.

In addition to promoting policy recommendations developed from Black Educators Initiative, this effort will be a stepping off point for NCTR into the policy landscape as it develops relationships and experience in effectively promoting its policy priorities.

Through EdImpact, Rennie and its partners will engage key stakeholders to ensure federal dollars are invested in equitable and effective practices that will enable students and communities to recover from the disruptions causes by COVID-19.

This project will gather timely information that will inform strategies for building interest in early childhood policy efforts, and ultimately, will influence the State’s early childhood policymaking decisions.

As Dr. Tony Watlington becomes the first new School District of Philadelphia superintendent in 10 years, Teach Plus will invest the new superintendent in teacher leadership and solidify Teach Plus’ connection over his first six months, opening avenues for increased district-wide impact over policies and instructional practices.

Despite the feeling that the nation is emerging from the pandemic, the education crisis is far from over as schools address unfinished learning, a teacher shortage, and mental health issues resulting from pandemic illness, deaths and economic harms. This grant supports the Rapid Response Desk (RRD), a collaboration that gathers district-informed input and monitors education challenges so that it is poised to influence policy and budget decisions that will be most impactful for these challenges.

The Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) will develop a toolkit that can be broadly available to early care and education (ECE) stakeholders and educators.