Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Commits $6.3 Million to Advance Equity in K-12 Schools

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) today announced $6.3 million in grants to four organizations working directly with educators, schools, and districts to design and replicate practices that promote and enable equity, through a focus on improving student well-being and equipping educators with the resources to assess student progress.

“This body of work is about translating equity from aspiration to realization. Each organization is developing resources for educators to support and enable equity at every level of our education system,” said Sandra Liu Huang, Head of Education at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. “These grants reflect our belief that student well-being is a critical precondition for equity. In order to ensure equity, we must intentionally design for it.”

The organizations receiving grants are:

• Beloved Community, a New Orleans-based nonprofit, will receive $1.8 million to expand its Equity Audit Tool Suite, which provides schools and districts with more than 180 customized indicators that can be used to determine growth on diversity, equity, and inclusion measures across the areas of governance, operations, curriculum, pedagogy, staff culture, and student culture.
• Seattle-based nonprofit Equal Opportunity Schools (EOS), whose mission is to ensure that students of color and low-income students have equitable access to advanced high school academic programs, will receive $1.5 million to scale its Action For Equity Toolkit and Framework, and to pilot real-time tools that help school districts determine their progress toward ensuring equitable access, opportunity, and participation in academically rigorous courses, and the development of anti-racist education environments.
• The HEARTS program at the University of California, San Francisco will receive $1.5 million to partner with ETR to develop a HEARTS Institute. HEARTS utilizes trauma-informed, healing-centered, equity-promoting approaches to prepare educators to support trauma-impacted youth and foster staff wellness through addressing burnout and secondary traumatic stress. Racial justice has been central to HEARTS work since its inception. According to research published in School Mental Health, HEARTS has helped schools reduce school suspension rates and incidents of violence through the implementation of trauma-informed practices. The HEARTS Institute will expand this unique, professional learning program nationwide.
• The Mindset Scholars Network (MSN), which advances scientific understanding of how norms, practices, and policies in education shape students’ experience of feeling respected as valued people and thinkers in school, will receive $1.5 million in funding to invest in the leadership of mid-career scholars from marginalized groups in the academy as they advance equity-centered practice- and policy-responsive scholarship and take on leadership roles in the education sector.

CZI’s education work is focused on ensuring that student demographics are no longer correlated with student outcomes and that every young person enters adulthood with the knowledge, skills, habits and agency they need to realize their full potential.

Part of that work is focused on supporting research, programs and organizations that work to advance the understanding and science of how students learn and develop, and support the pivotal role of teachers in supporting a student’s academic, mental, physical, emotional and cognitive development.

For more information about how CZI and our grant partners are supporting student well-being, visit chanzuckerberg.com/education/well-being.

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About the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Founded by Dr. Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg in 2015, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is a new kind of philanthropy that’s leveraging technology to help solve some of the world’s toughest challenges — from eradicating disease, to improving education, to reforming the criminal justice system. Across three core Initiative focus areas of Science, Education, and Justice & Opportunity, we’re pairing engineering with grant-making, impact investing, and policy and advocacy work to help build an inclusive, just and healthy future for everyone. For more information, please visit chanzuckerberg.com.