Catalyst Fund Grantees

New models of education are taking on very real barriers that constrain many students. Workshop Learning’s Workshop U pilot program seeks to create a college environment focused on real world learning and skills for recent high school graduates, centering traditionally excluded populations. The pilot program aims to reduce the cost of the college experience, help students develop valuable workplace skills that serve them within and across careers, and ground students’ learning journey in a deep understanding of who they are and what they want from life. By working with a cross-sector of partners and organizations, Workshop U is creating a model for collaboration, iteration and long-term systematic adoption of this educational model.

Philly Rise is a five-year real estate accelerator program for emerging black and brown real estate developers designed to provide them with the training, affordable capital, technical assistance and networks they need to grow their companies. A cohort of 10-12 black and brown real estate developers will be recruited into Philly Rise each year with each developer receiving 14 weeks of high-level training, a committed pool of capital that they can promptly access for their projects, mentorship and coaching through the predevelopment and construction phases of their projects, and access to an ecosystem of developers, architects, contractors, and other residential development professionals in Philadelphia. The Philly Rise accelerator brings together a range of partner organizations (Black Squirrel, Urban Land Institute, Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation and AR Spruce) to provide developer cohorts with these resources.

Seventy-five percent of individuals in the United States from the lowest economic quartile who started post-secondary degrees, never finished. College Unbound (CU) is a contemporary accredited college that aims to reinvent the higher education experience to address the very real barriers that constrain underserved adult learners. A convenient schedule and support system tailored to working and parenting adults initially attracts students. They stay engaged because of the small cohort model and transformational curriculum that develops high-value, field-specific knowledge that builds on their interests and provides credit for life experience. After successfully completing the rigorous, project-based curriculum, students are awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in Organizational Leadership and Change. CU partners with nonprofits and businesses to enable access to CU’s target adult population and to embed degree completion in the workplace. In January, 2022 College Unbound (CU) Philadelphia launched two pilot cohorts in partnership with the Philadelphia Housing Authority and the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. The business model limits student debt and aims to further economic advancement.

Barra’s investment in The Philadelphia Learning Collaborative (PLC) aims to further embed the innovative education approaches the Foundation has previously supported. Through a “thematic review,” in 2018 Barra looked back at several investments it had made in new school models including Science Leadership Academy, Building 21, Vaux Big Picture and the Workshop School and found that there were challenges to embedding these approaches into practice. These schools (and others) came together to address their need to strengthen the student-centered deeper learning practices in their schools and spread the innovation to other public, independent and charter schools interested in implementation. The PLC is an efficient way for the schools to collectively address these challenges as well as some of the obstacles they face working with colleges and universities to build a pipeline of educators prepared to teach at their schools, professional development, authentic assessment and establishing real-world connections for learning beyond the classroom.

The ongoing commitment of residents and community-based organizations to the Kensington section of Philadelphia has recently been bolstered by significant investments in the neighborhood. At the same time, economic forces associated with city-wide development threaten to change the neighborhood and make it unaffordable and culturally unwelcoming for current residents. Through a partnership with Shift Capital—a nationally-recognized impact developer—Impact Services Corporation will work with neighborhood stakeholders to create an emerging model for supporting the business corridor based on existing community land trusts. The Kensington Corridor Trust (Trust) will support sustainable and equitable community development through thoughtful real estate acquisition, community engagement, broad local ownership, small business lending and technical assistance. There are a few things that make this initiative different from other economic development efforts. The Trust will be controlled by a board of majority community stakeholders who represent the cultural and socioeconomic diversity of the current neighborhood and will hold and manage the properties. This community trust also aims to incorporate the commercial corridor, whereas other trusts have typically focused on residential community ownership. Neighborhoods around Philadelphia as well as other cities are watching the development of the Trust model as they consider how to avoid the economic inequality and displacement that often result from rapid gentrification.

The National Theater in London recently launched a new technology that allows hearing impaired audience members to access captioning through smart glasses that harness augmented reality to project captions within the user’s line of vision. Working with the local office of the National Theater’s technology partner, Accenture, the Temple University Institute on Disabilities will adapt the technology for use by regional theaters, who might not otherwise have the resources to develop such a tool. This approach overcomes existing cost and staffing barriers to providing closed captioning at every performance, allowing more equitable access for hearing impaired audiences. The Institute will extend the technology to include American Sign Language and Spanish language captioning.

AIM Academy has developed a research-based methodology that has proven to be successful in helping children with learning challenges succeed. Through their AIM Institute for Learning & Research, AIM has taken this approach and piloted it in the School District of Philadelphia to address struggling readers from low socioeconomic backgrounds who have a cognitive profile that is similar to children with learning differences. Given the limited reach of in-person trainings, AIM is developing AIM Pathways, a robust online platform that will decouple the opportunity to learn AIM’s approach from in-person courses allowing for more teachers to engage with this pedagogy. Because AIM Pathways is an online resource that is available anytime, anywhere, teachers will be able to continue to engage with the content and use its case study based curriculum in real time when identifying learning barriers in the classroom. AIM’s relationship with the Haskins Lab at Yale University’s Global Language and Literacy Innovation Hub provides a strong partner for designing the platform and dissemination model. The platform’s alignment with the goals of the national Grade Level Reading campaign provides opportunities for nationwide dissemination.

There is a growing interest in microcredentialing through online learning. It has the potential to provide educational opportunities for those who need more flexibility; however, retention for online learners is low. HospitalityTogether (HT) brings together nontraditional online learning through MIT’s edX with the Checkpoints student program to create opportunities for youth who choose to explore pathways other than college due to financial and personal barriers. The curriculum will be developed by a Credentialing Committee that includes Philadelphia’s top chefs and restaurateurs, who have the credibility to define new signals and standards for the hospitality marketplace. HT will expose participants to career pathways in the hospitality industry and provide access and encouragement to ongoing learning in support of career advancement. Ultimately HT envisions their program eventually serving as a model for the national restaurant industry.

There are 36 million low-literate adults in the country, and literacy service providers serve only 2 million of them. In Philadelphia alone, 550,000 adults lack the literacy skills needed to succeed in today’s economy. The Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE (ALXP) is an unprecedented project that will test, at an unparalleled scale, the effectiveness of mobile learning solutions among native and non-native speaking adults who lack basic English literacy skills. During the field test in Philadelphia, Dallas and San Francisco, eight mobile apps using new approaches to adult literacy will harness technologies like smartphones and tablets that low-literate populations use every day to address the language skills gap. These solutions will address the main obstacles to achieving literacy: access, retention and potential for scale. The most effective apps will be made available for use by literacy programs across the country allowing these tools to supplement and complement the limited resources currently available. Barra’s grant will support the Philadelphia field test.

In order to leverage the opportunity presented by the field test, additional funding of $60,000 was awarded to the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Adult Education (OAE) in November 2017. XPRIZE worked in close collaboration with the OAE for over a year to design the operations and processes of the Philadelphia field test. This funding will allow the OAE to promote effective integration of the apps into adult basic education and English language instruction.

Sometimes change may not seem dramatic from the outside but has the potential to shift thinking. Developed in partnership with the Philadelphia Police Department and former Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, the National Constitution Center’s program Policing in a More Perfect Union (Program) aspires to mend fractured police-community relations with training that educates Philadelphia officer-recruits in the rights and restrictions defined by the Bill of Rights and then unites recruits with students who lead an unusual conversation on police-community relations that benefits both populations. Funding will allow the Center to extend the nascent Program to law enforcement trainees throughout the Greater Philadelphia region, including in-service officers, and to students from a variety of regional high schools. The Program—the only one of its kind—has the potential to not only impact police officers and youth but also the larger community as these two constituencies build bridges and authentic engagement.