This grant will enable the Presidents’ Alliance for Higher Education and Immigration to improve opportunities and support for undocumented students. The Alliance will educate higher education leaders and key stakeholders about the challenges undocumented students face to access higher education. This grant will also help increase campus engagement among Texas higher education presidents and stakeholders to share better resources and strategies to support undocumented students. View Website

This grant will enable New America to undertake two research projects to combat pandemic-related declines in community college enrollment. The first will conduct case studies to profile three community colleges that have weathered enrollment declines better than the average college or have reversed their declines. The second will conduct a nationally representative survey of current community college students and stopped-out students to develop policy recommendations supporting students’ re-enrollment. View Website

Listen4Good will support 12 direct service grantee organizations with one-to-one coaching, group learning and curated tools and resources to build their capacity to listen systematically and center student voices in decision-making. View Website

This grant will enable Rutgers University’s Center for Minority Serving Institutions (CMSI) to prepare 40 institutional leaders to step into executive roles at MSIs. The MSI Aspiring Leaders will receive mentoring from current MSI presidents and coaching by executive search firms and will participate in programming on critical issues like student success, fundraising, strategic finance and crisis management. View Website

This capacity-building grant will enable The Steve Fund to lead the first-of-its-kind partnership effort to build HBCUs’ capacity to help students achieve academic, career and personal success by leveraging mental health and emotional wellbeing support. The Steve Fund will partner with key organizations to disseminate a survey to HBCU students and staff, and develop and deliver actionable evidence-based approaches to advance policy, practices and programs at HBCUs. View Website

This project will enable Mile2 Consulting to catalyze increased Medicaid usage by community colleges by providing college leaders and others with data about current usage, increasing awareness of the potential for new revenues, and inspiring action to expand and sustainably fund on-campus health services. View Website

This grant will leverage lessons learned from the BOOST initiative, particularly that most college students are not accessing federally funded basic needs supports like SNAP, Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), WIC, and Medicaid. This grant will allow Benefits Data Trust (BDT) to support colleges in enrolling their students in publicly available basic needs programs. View Website

This grant will enable the Education Strategy Group to launch and manage the Regional Adult Initiative for Skills and Employment (RAISE) effort. View Website

This grant will enable the National Center for Inquiry and Improvement (NCII) to partner with the Aspen Institute College Excellence Program and the Ohio Student Success Center to scale Ohio’s successful Leadership Academy in three new states.  Ascendium, ECMC Foundation and Kresge will each fund one state’s implementation of a year-long, student success-focused professional development program for mid-level community college faculty and staff. View Website

This grant will enable the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education (JNGI) to launch the first phase of the “Transforming the Foundational Postsecondary Experience” project, co-funded equally by Ascendium and the Bill and Melinda Gates and ECMC Foundations. View Website

This grant will enable the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) to create a framework for how higher education institutions can incorporate student perspectives in the development and implementation of college admission policies, processes and practices.  NACAC will convene a group of students and college admissions specialists to develop this equity-focused framework and disseminate it to its 25,000 members with the goal of encouraging and equipping institutions to more intentionally include student perspectives. This grant aligns with one of the Education Team’s 2022 grantmaking strategies, “promoting student voice.” View Website

This Education and Human Services grant will strengthen Generation Hope's efforts to support college students who are parents (some 20% of undergraduates) and who rarely receive childcare and other supports needed to complete degrees. This grant expands to additional colleges the FamilyU Initiative, which provides consulting and professional development to college leaders representing 27,000 enrolled students .Generation Hope will also develop tools to promote systemic policy changes supporting student parents. View Website

This grant supports the design and implementation of the Power of Systems, an eight-year effort by the National Association of System Heads (NASH) to transform public higher education for student success and social mobility in the 21st century. View Website

This grant will support the University Innovation Alliance (UIA) to design, implement, and scale an adaptable and systematic approach for elevating student voices to improve institutional policy, educational decisions and, ultimately, student graduation rates. UIA will train campus partners to conduct consistent, representative focus groups that elevate the learners’ voices and translate their insights into action and policy that improve student outcomes. View Website

This planning grant will create a statewide cohort of a broad group of Black -led organizations working on issues beyond education, such as health and social justice to develop a multi-year, statewide advocacy, grassroots organizing, and communication plan to improve college affordability for Black students in California. View Website

This grant will support the 2022 Delaware State University (DSU) HBCU Philanthropy Symposium. Held for more than a decade in Dover, Delaware, on or near DSU’s campus, the July 2022 Symposium has grown from just a few dozen participants to 250, and this marks the first year the Symposium will occur in Washington, DC. DSU has sought to make this a must-attend event for both public and private HBCUs seeking to increase private giving and it plans to take advantage of its more accessible location to attract more delegates and speakers hoping to promote increased giving to HBCUs. View Website

This grant will allow Bottom Line to share its best-in-class curriculum and training modules with other college advising programs. Bottom Line operates one of the nation’s best college advising coaching programs: over 75% of its students graduate college within six years with no more than $31,000 in debt, far surpassing national graduation rates and average college debt levels for students of color. View Website

This grant will support the national scaling of Strong Start to Finish (SSTF), a developmental (remedial) education reform strategy. While the vast majority of community college students place into non-credit bearing developmental education courses, especially in math, almost none ever transition to credit-bearing courses, wasting time and money, and torpedoing any chance of ever obtaining a degree. View Website

This grant supports two distinct but related efforts:  the biannual awarding of the $1 million Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence, and the creation of a data benchmarking tool that will help community colleges understand how they compare to their peers on a series of equity-funded student success metrics. View Website

New York City’s Student Success Network will create culturally-responsive policy improvements in the city’s college advising ecosystem by partnering with current college advisers and a critical consciousness expert to examine the limitations of traditional college coaching, surface new practice recommendations, test and refine the new practices, and share these learnings and recommendations with college advisers nationally. View Website