And Lyra’s Environmental Science & Climate Institute (ESCI) engages students interested in environmental sciences and climate change through a coordinated, multidisciplinary approach. Lyra and Gates staff also helped to launch a new regional collaborative with four Yampa Valley school districts to explore interest in collaborating to develop a climate change education pathway for students. Specifically, Gates gave a grant to River Science to expand its college and career credentialed hydrology pathway beyond Cañon City High School to all three school districts in the Fremont County Collaborative. Gates’ close partner and grantee Lyra Colorado continued to advance Climatarium to rural communities throughout the state. Close to 100 people attended the webinar. The event was youth-led and Chalkbeat facilitated. Organizing partners included Chalkbeat, Colorado Youth Congress, Young Americans Aspiring for Social and Political Action (YAASPA), and the Colorado Education Initiative. In response to national and local conversations and challenges around racial equity, the Gates education and communication staff initiated and organized a youth and teacher webinar with a focus on racial justice and mental health.
In 2021, Gates’ education program paid out $2,227,000 in strategic grants to 29 organizations and $420,000 in responsive capital grants. To advance this, in 2021 we focused our resources to seed innovation and support effective and diverse autonomous public school models pursue system-level reforms that create the conditions necessary to sustain effective schools support community-based programs in rural areas develop more robust human capital pipelines across the state and sustain media, advocacy, research, and engagement efforts that strengthen the education ecosystem.
Gates Family Foundation’s K-12 education program continues to be driven by the vision that all children in Colorado have access to educational opportunities that support their long-term success. While our new strategic direction did not fully go into effect until 2022, our 2021 grants and initiated work began to reflect our evolving direction: We learned significant lessons during the pandemic, notably that education was undergoing a once-in-a-generation shift - and as funders, we need to think differently about how we do grantmaking. The education team at Gates took an aligned but distinct approach that involved lots of listening to stakeholders, including school leaders, teachers, and students. In 2021, Gates Family Foundation embarked on a foundation-wide strategic planning process.
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