The purpose of the Youth and Education Program is to improve learning outcomes for vulnerable children and youth.
The focus of general grantmaking in Youth and Education is innovation. We are interested in supporting new ideas about how to engage children and youth in learning and new ways to bring together community-based systems that promote learning.
As underlying core values for how we approach our work, we believe that:
- All children and youth can learn.
- Solutions exist in community.
- Multiple perspectives lead to the best answers.
- Common causes drive social change.
Based on these core values, the strategies we support are both broad and targeted. They are broad because our work spans the developmental continuum from birth to age 24, and the learning outcomes we seek are holistic --- including physical, emotional, cognitive, social, and spiritual development. Our strategies are targeted because they emphasize innovation, they involve community stakeholders, and they aim to change community systems that support learning.
In addition, our strategies focus specifically on three key levers for change --- developing distinct partnerships, fostering collaborative leadership, and investing in innovation. We view partnerships as two or more individuals, groups, or organizations with identified self-interests, who work collaboratively to discover and implement innovative solutions that would not have emerged by working alone. We see leadership as a dynamic process for creating community change through collective action. Finally, we believe innovation fosters new ideas to produce value for individual and community stakeholders.
These elements form the integrating principles that guide our work, and they are summarized in the following framework.
Guidelines
Please apply online through the WKKF Web site. Your ideas can be submitted as a letter of inquiry or a pre-proposal. In either case, we ask that you address the following five areas and write your responses in the “Additional Information” section of the online application. We require responses to all five areas. Given our purpose to improve learning outcomes for vulnerable children and youth, please:
- Describe your innovation.
- Describe how you engage community stakeholders to achieve your mission.
- Describe the system you believe you are working within or trying to impact.
- Describe how you use leadership strategies to increase the impact of your change efforts, develop partnerships to further work you couldn’t accomplish on your own, and/or align community aspirations with formal and informal institutions.
- Describe how you evaluate your projects, learn from your work, and communicate your efforts to other audiences.