Evolving Our Grantmaking to Increase Impact: A Note from President and CEO Keith Witham
I’m excited to share an important update in Ascendium’s work: a refinement of our grantmaking approach. Through years of collaboration with our grant partners, we’ve deepened our understanding of what drives systemic change and how we can more effectively support learners from low-income backgrounds. This update strengthens our ability to learn from our partners, address critical gaps in evidence, and ensure our work is as impactful as possible.
Our refined approach sharpens our focus, streamlines priorities, and enhances our ability to support solutions that create meaningful change. In shaping these updates, we examined what’s been most effective, identified opportunities to improve, and refined our strategies to better meet the evolving needs of the field.
Our grantmaking is driven by three core strategies that aim to transform postsecondary education and workforce training systems to better serve learners from low-income backgrounds.
- Expand Opportunity: We will fund strategies to create more options for learners to engage in postsecondary education or workforce training that provides a direct path to living-wage employment in high-growth, high-demand fields.
- Support Learner Success: We will fund strategies to build and strengthen systems of academic and nonacademic support and redesign structures to help learners navigate and succeed in postsecondary education and workforce training.
- Connect and Align Systems: We will fund strategies to connect and align systems to ensure all learning counts towards credentials with labor market value and that learners do not experience dead ends as they pursue postsecondary education and workforce training.
Through these three core strategies, we'll continue working with our partners to identify areas of needed innovation, opportunities to rigorously evaluate promising solutions, and the conditions necessary to bring proven-effective solutions to greater scale.
We invite you to learn more about our refreshed strategic priorities during a webinar on Tuesday, April 1, at 1 p.m. CT. Click here to sign up. Thank you for joining us in our commitment to ensuring that learners from low-income backgrounds have paths to upward mobility.
Warm regards,
Keith Witham
President and Chief Executive Officer
Ascendium Education Group
Our North Star: We envision a world where more low-income learners succeed in postsecondary education and workforce training as a path to upward mobility, regardless of race, rurality, history of incarceration, or other factors.
