2023
Grants Awarded

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.

This grant allows the Foundation to support  community violence prevention and respond to the critical issue of community violence, an issue that has impact on each of the Foundation’s geographies and priority populations — including youth and families — and the issues focused on through the Foundation’s grantmaking – including mental health, school safety and completion, and juvenile justice.

Make the Road New York is a membership-based community organization operating in New York City with a focus on building the power of the City’s low-income and immigrant population using a multi-issue, multi-generational model of organizing, including its youth-led organizing program, the Youth Power Project. Sarah Landes is Youth Power Project Coordinator at Make the Road and has been working extensively to support youth-led action, particularly around the issues of education justice and dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex for over 10-years. As a Stone Leaders for Change, Sarah is working to build the leadership pipeline of the organization through coaching support, with an emphasis on addressing the deep need to support BIPOC, queer, women and gender non-conforming leaders in developing the tools necessary to successfully lead.

Communities United develops community leadership to build a shared root cause analysis of problems impacting their communities, to develop and advance innovative power-building strategies, and to engage in creating transformative systems change. Maria Degillo serves as both the Youth Director for Communities United and the Coordinator of Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE). During her time with the organization, Maria has helped to push some of CU’s most groundbreaking work, including the passing of SB 2793 that required the collection and reporting of suspensions and expulsions in schools and SB 100 that ended the use of zero tolerance and exclusionary discipline in schools across the state of Illinois. As a Stone Leader for Change, Maria is working to document both the personal and professional impact of being a part of youth leadership work with a focus on the sustainability of youth leadership and an examination of how narratives impact policy.

This grant is given in honor of Michael Conway.

This is a general operating grant.

This grant will support the work of Boston Youth Justice & Power Union, a youth-led organization founded in 2011 to center youth issues and Black and Brown youth in the city of Boston.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant will advance local member-led campaigns for Dignity in Schools Campaign Solutions Not Suspensions, engage youth in leadership development and support collective national action.

This grant will support efforts to provide trainings and technical assistance to youth-led/youth-serving organizations in Philadelphia, expanding their capacity to empower students as change agents and deepening their understanding of the legal solutions available to address educational barriers facing students.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant will support UJIMA, a group of young men of color, ages 14-21, to come together to collectively make a change in their communities, specifically on the issue of their mental health.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant will support Black and Brown youth as they build leadership for healing justice and activism in Chicago Freedom School’s Northstar Liberatory Training Collective and other youth leadership development programs.

This is a general operating support grant.

This is a general operating support grant.

The F5C aims to increase the impact of our programming with directly impacted community members as they access necessary support and participate in the process to develop innovative strategies towards the mission of youth prison closure. Directly impacted participants will contribute their unique perspectives and root themselves in a community of peers and advocates while deepening their skills and knowledge.

This general operating grant to The Education Trust will support its New York based work.

The Rennie Center will partner with Boston Public Schools to build capacity for integrating transformative social-emotional learning into instruction by supporting SEL coaches who work directly with high schools. In addition, we will draw on the successes of Open Opportunity Massachusetts to pursue a statewide policy agenda on “Rethinking Education.”

This a general operating support grant.

This a general operating support grant.

This grant will support creating LiberatEd’s secondary-level content and curricula through its educators’ Fellowship and Youth Leaders Program.

This is a general operating support grant.

NCTR will extend its recent collaboration with Columbia University’s Center for Public Research and Leadership (CPRL), implementing their recommendations to improve NCTR’s data collection tools and processes, refining analysis of BEI grantee data, and improving both communication and programming for BEI programs and the larger NCTR Network.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant will allow the Lead Hubs to create and utilize an online, searchable repository for educators to identify research-based strategies around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion that are responsive to their identified needs within their district or school-based equity strategies.

CASEL will examine the role of SEL in developing children’s reading skills and share findings to promote SEL as an evidence-based strategy. This is in response to recent research that indicates lost instructional time has negatively impacted student achievement and deepened disparities in access to high-quality instruction across student subgroups.

This is a general operating support grant.

The grant supports the Rapid Response Desk that leverages the power of collective advocacy to enable 12 aligned organizations to enhance and accelerate their ability to advance policy that improves outcomes for underserved students, including students of color, students from low-income backgrounds, English learners, students experiencing homelessness, students with disabilities, and immigrant students.

This grant will increase understanding of and momentum to infuse P-3 content/strategies into principal preparation programs.

This is a general operating support grant for the Center for Study of Child Care Employment.

This is a general operating support grant.

This is a general operating support grant.

This will support a child care movement network that engages partners and stakeholders across policy, research, communications, and organizing to center racial and gender equity in child care in order to create and enact a bold, equitable agenda.

This project will help states, higher education leaders, and advocates make advances towards the vision of a diverse, effective, well-prepared, and well-supported ECE profession.

This grant will support Jumpstart’s workforce development program in San Francisco and the roll-out of its workforce programming to all sites nationally.

HealthConnect will build an evidence-based case for the value of community-based doula models, promote sustainability for the workforce, and ensure that community-based doulas are included in national discussions with policymakers about their reimbursement, certification requirements, and the diversification and sustainability of the community-based doula workforce.

This grant will support Erikson Institute’s Early Teaching and Learning Academy and Policy and Leadership Department.

Build policymakers’ and the public’s support for increased investments in high-quality early childhood education and care, coupled with investments in a strong early childhood workforce, by elevating the voices of members from law enforcement and business communities.

This is a general operating support grant.

BUILD Initiative will support Illinois’ leaders in building a high-quality, comprehensive ECE workforce system by assisting cross-agency, public, and private sector analyses of current foundational efforts.

This is a general operating support grant.

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 is a general operating support grant.

This grant supports the Youth Leadership Development Continuum, a series of after school and summer programs, credit bearing internships, media production, and paid employment that enables young people to advocate for policy and systems change. Its media work and collaborations with other youth serving and social justice organizations is also helping to strengthen the ecosystem of youth activism in Philadelphia.

This is a general operating support grant.

This is a general operating support grant.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant provides general operating support for the Urban Youth Collaborative.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant supports Juvenile Law Center’s Youth Engagement projects that create opportunities for youth with experience in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems to use their personal stories and experiences as a platform for social change in their communities.

The Youth Action Institute (formerly the Youth Justice Board) requests continuing support to examine the experience of safety and dignity for queer and trans youth of color in New York City, and to continue a previous cohort’s work on social media surveillance.

This is a general operating support grant.

Building off the past year’s program development and the Democracy School 2100 [DS2100] pilot [to occur between April – June 2023], Coro will further institutionalize and embed DS2100 in its leadership development portfolio to engage a new generation of youth leaders and organizers who have the political and civic know-how to foster lasting systemic change.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant supports the Youth Action Board of the Chicago Continuum of Care.

The Stone Scholarships will support pre-service teachers seeking to influence educational reform within multiple school system levels. Scholarships will be awarded to qualified teacher candidates committed to working in urban schools to provide tuition support, mentoring, professional development, and travel funds.

This grant will support leadership coaching and EdD program improvement to assess, monitor, and continue to deepen the extent to which UIC school leaders are strengthening their ability to diagnose and develop the adult SEL capacity in their schools which will, in turn, strengthen the SEL support for students. In addition, scale up our sharing of strategies and learnings with the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) in a variety of ways that includes but is not limited to: engagement with the Office of Principal Quality, Office of Network Support (ONS), Office of Early Childhood, and most importantly the Executive Director of Social and Emotional Learning in the Office of College and Career Success (OCCS).

The general operating grant will be used to engage and support the work of the Massachusetts Education Equity Partnership (MEEP) – a coalition of civil rights, social justice, and education advocates from across the Commonwealth working together to promote educational equity for historically underserved students in our state’s schools.

This is a general operating support grant.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant will support LPI to expand and strengthen its equity-focused, high-quality educator preparation through the Educator Preparatory Laboratory (EdPrepLab) and to extend on-the-ground community engagement on the implementation of community schools and relationship-centered schools in California through the Shared Learning Initiative.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant will support the Center for Collaborative Education’s statewide effort to bring communities and schools together as partners to build voice and demand state policy changes to transform Massachusetts’ current education system to move away from a one size fits all and inequitable way of supporting schools and communities.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant will launch Cohort 4 of the Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) residency program, continue to secure sustainable funding for the model, and begin a process of documentation and dissemination of TESOL’s curriculum and design to support similar residencies.

This grant supports the Stone Foundation Fellowships in Early Childhood Development Leadership.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant will support Start Early’s administrative, legislative, and grassroots efforts to advance the early childhood system in Illinois, with a focus on infants and toddlers, children and families in priority populations, and the workforce.

This is a general operating support grant.

This grant supports New America’s Early & Elementary Education Policy Program to continue to inject Birth-3rd grade policy ideas into the national education conversation and produce new policy insights to propel B-3rd reforms in states, school districts, communities, and schools.

This is a general operating support grant.

This general operating grant will support organizational initiatives advancing state public policies promoting excellence in Illinois early childhood education and child care.

This is a general operating support grant.

This is a general operating support grant for T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood National Center.

This is a general operating support grant.

Advocate Children’s Hospital Healthy Steps Program, in conjunction with Advocate Medical Group, will continue to engage and support physician practices serving socially vulnerable communities to promote effective screening and management for child mental health issues and unmet social needs.