New Profit Makes $1 Million Investment in Leading Educators
February 3, 2016 (Boston) – New Profit, a national nonprofit venture philanthropy fund, is investing $1 million over the next four years to support Leading Educators, which will support the New Orleans nonprofit in ensuring that all students have access to great teachers, especially in urban schools.
Through this investment, Leading Educators will be a part of the New Profit Innovation Fund (NPIF), New Profit’s core investment vehicle, which serves as a learning lab for identifying and catalyzing the best social impact organizations in America. The funding from NPIF will be unrestricted and supplemented by strategic advisory support from New Profit staff in collaboration with Deloitte Consulting.
“Joining the New Profit network will enable us to smartly grow to support the development of thousands of teacher leaders across the country,” said Jonas Chartock, CEO of Leading Educators. “New Profit’s track record of helping social impact organizations like ours scale gives me great confidence that, as a result of our partnership, we will get much closer to seeing great schools for all students via teacher leadership development.”
Students of color from low-income communities are disproportionately underserved by the education system as it is. Meanwhile, the country’s largest districts are losing high-performing educators at the alarming rate of 10,000 teachers per year. These students have the potential to achieve more in school alongside high-impact teachers. Leading Educators partners with schools to build high-impact teacher leadership programs in order to increase student achievement and enhance the effectiveness and sustainability of teachers in urban schools.
Leading Educators will add to the growing New Profit Investment Fund. New Profit Managing Partner Bob Searle who will serve on the board of Leading Educators says, “We’re excited to work alongside Leading Educators as they continue to break new ground in the field of teacher leadership. The organization has seen impressive growth since its inception, and we are consistently impressed with their dedication to great teaching.”
The organization’s core program is a 20-month Fellowship, in which selected teachers participate in leadership development sessions and develop impact plans for their students. Already, Leading Educators Fellows are shown to stay in high poverty schools at rates 10-29% higher than the district average. Louisiana in particular showed that Fellows had a positive, statistically significant impact on student achievement in mathematics.
The investment in Leading Educators is part of New Profit’s new capacity building partnership with The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. To learn more about the partnership, click here.
For more about Leading Educators, visit their website at www.leadingeducators.org.
About New Profit
New Profit is a national nonprofit venture philanthropy fund. The organization’s mission is to break down the barriers standing between people and opportunity in America. To do so, New Profit is working to transform the way America educates its children, propels people towards social and financial stability, and creates healthy communities. Since being founded in 1998, New Profit has collaborated with philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, foundations, businesses, policy advocates and other entities to help drive more than $1 billion towards innovative, disruptive approaches to social problem solving. New Profit’s unique, integrated approach brings together the following activities: investing through the New Profit Innovation Fund and Focus Funds; changing public policy through America Forward; and building communities of learning and action around innovative new approaches to change through the Gathering of Leaders and other activities.