New Profit Makes Significant Operating Investment in City Year
July 12, 2016 (Boston) – New Profit, a national nonprofit venture philanthropy fund working to break down systemic barriers to opportunity in America, is making a significant unrestricted operating investment in City Year’s School Design Division through our Reimagine Learning Fund. The Fund seeks to transform learning environments to focus on an understanding of learner diversity and a commitment to student-centered learning to ensure that all students – including those who have been systematically under-served by traditional schools – are supported to succeed.
The Reimagine Learning Fund is investing in City Year’s (CY) School Design Division (SDD), a collaboration with the Center for Social Organization of Schools, School of Education, Johns Hopkins University (CSOS), because of the unique power and potential of its multi-faceted partnerships: (1) Compass Academy, a newly launched public charter school in Denver, CO (2) Diplomas Now –an innovative secondary school improvement collaboration and (3) City Year and CSOS’s Talent Development Secondary national network of school partnerships.
The School Design Division collaboration works to understand how to build school environments that are designed around the complex needs of students in areas of concentrated poverty and are proven to support the success of all students, including those with learning differences and those who have needs for more intense support to enable them to overcome the impact of adversity on their ability to learn and succeed. The division leverages the expertise of researchers, youth development experts and school reformers from the Johns Hopkins University, School of Education and City Year Design teams along with the additional human capital of AmeriCorps members to implement and scale effective practices.
Building on a one-year incubation investment provided in 2014 to support the launch of the innovative new charter school, Compass Academy, the Reimagine Learning Fund is making an additional investment to accelerate the transformative work of the School Design Division.
“We look forward to deepening our work with New Profit and the Reimagine Learning collaborative,” says Jim Balfanz, President of City Year. “New Profit’s rich experience in helping high-impact organizations to scale impact will inform our work as we develop and refine evidence-based practices for supporting complex learners and disseminate those practices across our large, and expanding, national platforms.”
Currently, more than one million students go to school in areas of concentrated poverty where less than 60% of students graduate. The challenge is intensified by the fact that those students who are most at risk of slipping off track and failing to graduate are students of color, English Language Learners, and students with learning differences. There is a significant gap between what the diverse students in those schools need to thrive and what schools have the capacity to provide.
City Year places over 3,000 highly motivated, diverse young adults in 300 schools in 28 communities nationwide to ensure that students in areas of concentrated urban poverty will reach 10th grade on track with their peers. These AmeriCorps members support schools in growing students’ core values, attitudes and skills that holistically drive social-emotional growth, academic success and civic participation.
The School Design Division collaboration serves as an action tank, partnering with Compass Academy as a hub of innovation, and spreading best practices that emerge from Compass through the vast City Year and Johns Hopkins networks. The School Design Division will also build an evidence base of practices to influence national policy as both of these organizations have successfully done in the past. Building on the collective assets and learnings of City Year, CSOS and Compass Academy, the School Design Division is positioned to drive the conversation nation-wide about what it takes to design schools based on the needs of students who all of our schools have traditionally left behind.
In a crowded landscape of school transformation organizations, the School Design Division stands out as an organization with a central focus on supporting the most at risk students. This, combined with the proven capabilities of the partners involved with the School Design Division will make an important contribution to the field wide understanding of effective school design.
A recent study from Policy Studies Associates showed that schools partnering with City Year were two times more likely to improve English scores and up to three times more likely to improve test scores in math. Additionally, students in schools with City Year gained 1 month of learning in Math and ELA, as compared with non-City Year partner schools.
Recent impact results from a randomized control trial conducted by MDRC show that Diplomas Now, a partnership between Talent Development Secondary, City Year and Communities In Schools, increases the percentage of sixth- and ninth-graders with no early-warning signs in attendance, behavior and course performance.
The new funding from New Profit will be unrestricted and supplemented by strategic support provided by Deal Partner Jody Cornish. “The School Design Division which brings together City Year and CSOS/JHU is a unique entity – combining the power of an innovation lab that can design and test practices to support the diverse needs of learners, the ability to directly influence practice across 300 high need schools in areas of concentrated poverty, research capabilities to codify insights to be shared field-wide and proven ability to influence national policy. Additionally, City Year and CSOS have proven ability to build partnerships with other innovative organizations. This investment will support the School Design Division as an innovation platform to spread practices that support the needs of diverse learners.”
In addition to the support of our Deal Partner, City Year will receive support from our Design Council, a set of advisors who provide expertise in areas of learning differences, evaluation and systemic impact strategy, among others.
During the time of this investment, New Profit will focus its support on three areas: 1) strategic planning for the School Design Division, 2) operational planning, and 3) evolving the School Design Division Advisory Board.
Learn more about City Year by visiting www.cityyear.org. Learn more about the Center for Social Organization of Schools by visiting www.csos.jhu.edu. For more information on Compass Academy, visit http://www.compassacademy.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.