All Grants

This grant supports the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce in mapping economic opportunity by identifying where good jobs exist in urban and rural regions and establishing the most reliable educational and training pathways to those jobs. This analysis will expand on existing research by contextualizing opportunities to locale and enabling education and workforce providers to align programs with existing and projected labor demand.

This grant supports Community Colleges of the Appalachian Region and its members in continuing to advance student success reforms despite COVID-19-related impacts.

This grant supports the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning in coordinating the development of the Regional Upskilling Alliance, an innovative approach to developing sustainable connective structure that more effectively supports low-wage and unemployed adults in obtaining new skills and communicating them to employers in order to access thriving wage career opportunities.

This grant supports Ithaka Harbors in developing and making accessible a robust digital educational resource for incarcerated learners, as well as undertaking a major research initiative that will inform institutional change across the postsecondary education in prison field. The goal of the project is to leverage technology to increase learner success, while improving instruction and curricula.

This grant supports CivicLab, a project of Columbus Learning Center Management Corporation, in launching a cohort of six to eight rural community partnerships, building the capacity of rural community learning systems to improve learner-level outcomes along a talent development pathway.

This grant supports Michael Levin-Epstein in producing a four-part podcast series focused on postsecondary education and workforce training in rural communities on the Rural Matters podcast.

This grant supports the Thurgood Marshall College Fund in piloting an online college degree completion program for near-completer students at member HBCU Delaware State University in partnership with Southern New Hampshire University.

This grant supports Coleridge Initiative in developing and launching a data use challenge and call for proposals to solicit data-driven ideas that inform education and workforce transitions. Ascendium will select individual data challenge projects to support from a set of proposals submitted by Coleridge Initiative during the grant period. The selected projects will link education and workforce data, provide states the relevant data analysis capacity to answer critical questions about student progression and inform evidence-based policies and practices that support learners from low-income backgrounds.

This grant supports America Achieves in providing technical assistance and funder matchmaking to a cohort of regional coalitions as they advance entrepreneurial economic development, good jobs and economic mobility, particularly for rural areas and underrepresented groups.

This grant supports the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University in creating a suite of training materials designed for colleges that have not been well served by existing technical assistance providers in the guided pathways reform movement.