Civic Nation This grant will enable Civic Nation to help ensure that millions of Americans in traditionally hard-to-reach communities learn about and take advantage of federal student debt relief programs. View Website Amount $500,000 Year Location Washington, D.C. Program Education Focus Area Urban Pathways to College
University of South Florida Foundation This grant will support the Florida College Access Network (FCAN) in strengthening its advocacy and convening capacity to connect policymakers with stakeholders from different sectors to improve Florida’s postsecondary pathways. View Website Amount $175,000 Year 2023 Location Tampa, Fla. Program Education Focus Area Urban Pathways to College
Ithaka Harbors, Inc. This grant will enable Ithaka to expand its stranded credits “clearinghouse,” which it piloted successfully in the Akron, OH, region. View Website Amount $250,000 Year 2023 Location New York, New York Program Education Focus Area Urban Pathways to College
Get Schooled Foundation This grant will allow Detroit youth to access personalized youth-friendly, research-based, digital college access content via popular social media channels: text, TikTok, Kahoot!, YouTube, and a mobile-first website. Get Schooled will work with Detroit College Access Network (DCAN) and Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) to reach Detroit juniors and seniors with FAFSA support, scholarship and college essay support, and other college-going content to increase college enrollment among Detroit seniors. View Website Amount $300,000 Year 2023 Location New York, New York Program Education Focus Area Urban Pathways to College
Strada Collaborative, Inc. This grant will enable InsideTrack to launch California Reconnect to help California adults with some college but no degree to complete their credentials. InsideTrack will partner with two Kresge grantees, the Institute for Higher Education Policy and California Competes, to conduct targeted outreach to 13,000 stopped-out students and provide advising and coaching to support their re-enrollment at 30 colleges and universities in the Inland Empire, South San Joaquin Valley (Fresno), and Sacramento. View Website Amount $500,000 Year 2023 Location Indianapolis, IN Program Education Focus Area Urban Pathways to College
iMentor This grant will enable iMentor to design, implement, and refine a national strategy based on its successful New York City region model to institutionalize how it brings higher education partners into its postsecondary framework. This model will allow the organization to build new revenue-generating models with a placed-based focus by providing tech-forward tailored mentoring experiences for colleges to improve college-going and completion rates for first-generation and students of color. View Website Amount $300,000 Year 2023 Location New York, New York Program Education Focus Area Urban Pathways to College
ACT Inc. The American College Application Campaign will pilot a national College Match Day campaign for 2,000 high school juniors — including in Detroit, New Orleans, Miami, Memphis, and Fresno — to create earlier awareness of and preparation for the senior year college application process. The students will create college lists, complete a mock FAFSA, and apply for scholarships to help them enter senior year with an enhanced understanding of postsecondary options. View Website Amount $350,000 Year 2023 Location Iowa City, Iowa Program Education Focus Area Urban Pathways to College
CollegeSpring CollegeSpring will develop new technology, hire new leadership, and bolster research to expand its current services, including math remediation, dual enrollment, and career preparation to serve an additional 60,000 students in Detroit and across the country to reduce inequitable racial and economic disparities in standardized test outcomes. View Website Amount $450,000 Year 2023 Location San Francisco, California Program Education Focus Area Urban Pathways to College
Woods & Watts Effect This grant will allow the consulting firm Woods & Watts Effect (WWE) to facilitate a community engagement process to understand better what is needed to support students in Detroit to aspire to, apply to, persist in, and graduate from HBCUs and what might entice them to return to Detroit to begin their careers. WWE will support stakeholders in the Detroit HBCU pipeline to develop shared solutions to improve Detroit students’ success at HBCUs. View Website Amount $200,000 Year 2023 Location Detroit, MI Program Detroit, Education Focus Area Urban Pathways to College
College Promise This grant will allow College Promise (fiscally sponsored by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors) to continue to serve as the free college tuition movement’s national connector and convener. College Promise will deliver high-quality technical assistance, broaden and amplify research and policy that addresses the specific needs of historically marginalized students, and support the statewide expansion, capacity, and sustainability of promise programs nationally to help more students achieve a more affordable college degree. View Website Amount $500,000 Year 2023 Location Program Education Focus Area Urban Pathways to College
John Burton Advocates for Youth This grant will allow John Burton Advocates for Youth to provide tools, resources, technical assistance, and a community of practice for California community colleges to implement new institutional Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP) student requirements. SAP refers to the minimum academic standards, including GPA and percent of courses completed, that students must maintain to be eligible for federal, state, and institutional financial aid. View Website Amount Year 2023 Location San Francisco, CA Program Education Focus Area Urban Pathways to College
National Association for College Admission Counseling, Inc. This grant will enable the National Association for College Admissions Counseling (NACAC) to build a community of leaders and practitioners concerned about equity in college enrollment. NACAC will establish the Equity in Enrollment Collaborative to disseminate innovative practices that span student outreach, recruitment, admission, aid, and scholarships. View Website Amount $300,000 Year 2023 Location Arlington, Virginia Program Education Focus Area Urban Pathways to College
Education Reform Now This grant will enable Education Reform Now to play a watchdog role in the wake of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling limiting the use of race-conscious college admissions. Education Reform Now will track changes that occur over the next two admissions cycles and produce annual reports and interactive data reporting to give practitioners and policymakers close to real-time data about the diversity of applicant, admit, and enrollment pools at four-year institutions, shining a light on effective and ineffective approaches strategies to maintain or enhance student diversity. View Website Amount $200,000 Year 2023 Location New York, NY Program Education Focus Area Urban Pathways to College
uAspire This grant will enable uAspire to help the higher education field transition to the new FAFSA form launching in December 2023. uAspire will overhaul its advising curriculum and training resources and pursue strategic partnerships to ensure its expertise reaches students and the practitioners who support them. View Website Amount $450,000 Year 2023 Location Boston, Massachusetts Program Education Focus Area Urban Pathways to College
Scholarship America Inc. This grant supports Scholarship America to build a data warehouse to meet its strategic goal of awarding most of its funds to Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and other underrepresented students with high financial needs by 2027. View Website Amount $150,000 Year 2023 Location Minneapolis, Minnesota Program Education Focus Area Urban Pathways to College
Strive for College Collaborative This grant will enable Strive for College to expand the number of students it supports nationally with college enrollment and completion coaching, and mentoring. In August 2022, the Common Application, also an education grantee, will offer Strive for College services to all its student applicants, increasing demand from 85,000 students to 136,000. To meet this emerging need, Strive for College will expand its corporate partnerships, increase its pool of volunteer mentors by 46%, and improve its mentor training and technological infrastructure. View Website Amount $450,000 Year 2022 Location Milpitas, CA Program Education Focus Area Urban Pathways to College
Education Reform Now Education Reform Now will pursue changes in two inequitable college admissions practices: legacy preference and binding early decision. It will 1) research information gaps on these two policies; 2) develop policy proposals for federal, state, local and non-governmental actors; and 3) create a communications plan to influence elite opinion leaders and policymakers at the national, state and higher education institutional level using the findings and recommendations. View Website Amount $175,000 Year 2022 Location New York, NY Program Education Focus Area Urban Pathways to College
California Competes This grant will support California Competes to identify institutional strategies that postsecondary institutions should take, and policy changes needed, to support the re-enrollment and graduation of adults with some college and no degree (“comebackers”). California Competes will: 1) recruit comebackers to serve as co-researchers and co-designers; 2) conduct research to identify institutional changes that will improve how colleges serve returning adults; 3) advise leaders at Sacramento State and Shasta College while they pilot the interventions; and 4) create publications to share findings and amplify the policy reforms needed. View Website Amount $375,000 Year 2022 Location Berkeley, CA Program Education Focus Area Urban Pathways to College
Colaborativo PR This grant will enable ColaborativoPR to implement an evaluation administered by MDRC and strengthen its college access and success programs. ColaborativoPR, which will be the Education Team's first direct grant to a Puerto Rican nonprofit, works mainly in Loíza, located on the northeast coast of Puerto Rico. Fifty-four percent of Loiza's population live under the poverty level and it has the 5th lowest college enrollment rate among Puerto Rico's 78 municipalities. ColaborativoPR has seen promising results since launching in 2014 and hopes MDRC’s evaluation will validate its outcomes to scale its work over the long-term. View Website Amount $330,000 Year 2022 Location San Juan, Puerto Rico Program Education Focus Area Urban Pathways to College
Grove Collective Foundation This grant will enable Grove Collective Foundation to work with three Kresge grantees (Bottom Line, OneGoal and Peer Forward) to help launch strategic initiatives designed to improve college access and success. Grove, a new nonprofit, works with experienced social entrepreneurs to support current CEOs to launch innovative efforts ranging from leveraging technology to identifying ways to tap into federal funds. View Website Amount $450,000 Year 2022 Location Washington, D.C. Program Education Focus Area Urban Pathways to College