By Leslie Boissiere, The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading
When the Belk Foundation wanted to magnify its investment in early literacy, the family foundation joined the Georgia Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, a statewide initiative that unites philanthropy with nonprofits and government agencies.
When the Iowa West Foundation wanted to expand the impact of its early reading work in Council Bluffs, the community foundation joined with the Iowa Council on Foundations Education Funders Network for a statewide collaboration.
The Kenneth Rainin Foundation joined a funders network promoting third-grade reading in Oakland, CA, which is now spurring action across the state.
These three small foundations are among dozens of local funders connected to a nationwide movement known as the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, which pulls together philanthropy in a truly original way. Rather than focus on a topic or a region, the GLR Campaign asks foundations to join in achieving a single result: increasing the number of low-income children who read proficiently by the end of third grade.
Right now, four-fifths of children from low-income families have not mastered reading by that point, leaving them struggling to read in the later grades. These are the students who are less likely to finish high school and find the kind of job that can pull them out of poverty.
The GLR Campaign put a stake in the ground in 2010 that we would increase by 100% the number of low-income third graders reading on grade level. Launched with support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Campaign now counts more than 200 investors, donors, and United Ways in our network.
About a dozen invest at the enterprise level, allowing us to support technical assistance, policy development, and communications. Others focus on certain issues, such as health, dyslexia, young men of color, or parent education.
The majority of our funders are spread across the country, working in the more than 150 communities that have joined the GLR Communities Network. Each of these cities, counties, or towns has developed a cross-sector coalition and a plan of action to support early reading. In particular, they’re focusing on improving school readiness, reducing absenteeism in the early grades, and offering summer learning opportunities for children from low-income families. Keeping parents engaged and children healthy are both crucial to these goals.
In some places, the work began on a state level. In other places, though, small family or community foundations are amplifying their own efforts by linking to or driving statewide interest in this important issue. In Iowa, for instance, activity in Council Bluffs, Dubuque, and other cities spurred the Iowa Council of Foundations to develop a statewide collaboration on early reading. Building on its investments in summer learning programs in Charlotte and Birmingham, the Belk Foundation decided to achieve greater impact in Georgia by investing in the statewide GLR Campaign’s pilot program aligning curriculum and instruction from prekindergarten through third grade.
These kinds of investments allow small foundations to have an outsized impact on one of the biggest challenges facing our country, aligning their strategies and their investments for the collective good.
Come hear more about the strategies, challenges, and opportunities to statewide funder collaboration on Thursday, October 30 at 11:30 a.m. during Exponent Philanthropy’s 2014 National Conference.
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Leslie Boissiere is the chief operating officer at the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading.
