Awarded Grants

This grant supports Per Scholas in bringing to scale their technology workforce training and professional development model to tens of thousands more learners and hundreds more employer partners throughout the U.S. Ascendium’s investment will support Per Scholas in their efforts to build new partnerships to better reach learners, deepen its bench of highly-qualified instructors and redesign its recruitment and admissions processes to be more learner friendly.

This grant supports the University of Tennessee's Grow Your Own Center in enabling postsecondary institutions to launch competency-based teacher apprenticeship programs that reach rural regions and learners throughout the state. Through the launch of the Institute for Competency-Based Teacher Education, postsecondary institutions will have access to standardized, competency-based materials and assessments that will ensure more rural learners can engage in and complete apprenticeship-based degree programs that provide a pathway to teaching jobs in rural school districts.

This grant supports Frontline Justice in convening a national task force to design and implement a curriculum and credentialing pathway for non-attorney justice workers who provide critical legal services to underserved communities.

This grant supports the Vera Institute of Justice in carrying out a comprehensive set of research and direct technical assistance activities with all 50 state-level departments of correction and the federal Bureau of Prisons to support the implementation of Pell grant access for incarcerated learners.

This grant supports the Cornell Prison Education Program in evolving its incarcerated learner database into a sharable digital tool, while developing models for using this open-source software to improve learner outcomes.

This grant supports the Community College Research Center in deepening the evidence base across a range of student success reform areas and conducting syntheses of current research in practitioner-oriented briefs and through an update to the pivotal book, “Redesigning America’s Community Colleges,” which launched the national guided pathways movement.

This grant supports The Education Trust-West in providing technical assistance to teams from up to 16 California institutions to develop and implement plans for scaled developmental education reform pursuant to state legislative mandates.

This grant supports the University of Puget Sound in designing and beginning to create resources and trainings aimed at improving teaching and learning within college classrooms in prison. An initial project will focus on identifying and codifying promising practices for preparing faculty to teach in carceral settings.

This grant supports National Center for Inquiry and Improvement (NCII) in replicating the Ohio Leadership Academy for Student Success in two to three additional states. NCII will work with selected states to implement key elements of the Ohio model for providing targeted training for leaders within community colleges, thereby building state- and system-level capacity to implement wide-scale strategies for student success.

This grant supports the Center on Rural Innovation (CORI) in building pathways to tech employment for learners from low-income backgrounds in rural communities. This investment will help six communities in CORI’s Rural Innovation Network to identify tech employment needs among local employers and design and implement tech training programs designed to meet the needs of rural learners and local employers.