In January 2020, the Nellie Mae Education Foundation launched a bold new strategy: Advancing racial equity in education as the central focus of its grantmaking.
For the past decade, the Foundation had championed “student-centered learning (SCL),” an approach that advances rigorous and engaging learning experiences attuned to students’ individual interests and needs. Providing all students with equitable opportunities to learn, Nellie Mae recognized, required strategies aimed at students, teachers, schools, districts, and states. For years, Foundation-supported work across these levels had yielded positive results, including the development of a high-quality SCL model, and evidence of more highly engaged students and teachers. Still, persistent challenges remained.
“We were not affecting students of color in an impactful way,” says Nellie Mae former Board Chair Jan Phlegar. “We were not affecting black, brown, and indigenous students in terms of any real change in getting to the root causes of inequities they faced every day.”
Reckoning with this challenge, Nellie Mae committed to a deep learning journey, working in close partnership with equity change consultants (from OpenSource Leadership and MP Associates). Seeking to bring equity to the forefront of all its work, Nellie Mae heightened its commitment to eradicating disparities, pledging to challenge systemic barriers and more explicitly support the priorities of youth least well-served. As Nick Donohue, Nellie Mae’s President and CEO, puts it, “We recognized that as a philanthropic organization, we could do something with the immense privilege that we had to address the deep, racial inequities that are still present today in our public education system. We built up a set of equity principles that would guide our work moving forward.”
Evan Klonsky 