GIA Receives Grant from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: Awarded $1.29 Million to Expand Capacity
Growing Inland Achievement has received a generous grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to expand our efforts to improve educational and economic success for students in the Inland Empire. The grant is part of the Gates Foundation’s Intermediaries for Scale initiative, which recognizes disparity caused by race and income is increasing difficulty for students to achieve educational and economic success. The Intermediaries for Scale grant received by GIA deepens both synergy and alignment within our network and strengthens our strategies to serve educators and educational institutions as connectors, advisors, and strategists. What will the Gates Foundation grant mean to our network, and what will increasing scale look like? GIA has begun the process of increasing awareness, building connections, and informing campus-level decision-making to transform our region’s educational institutions and economy. First, GIA plans to increase issue awareness at educational institutions by hiring staff so we may tell the region’s story to our network and the public. This will also help GIA strengthen partnerships with industry to bolster the collective impact of the organizations and institutions committed to our network’s mission. Second, GIA’s will better inform campus-level decision-making by hiring graduate-level interns to build regional data capacity and evaluate grants for continuous program improvement. In this way, increasing capacity means GIA can better integrate numerous effective practices and maximize our network’s collective impact to achieve our educational and economic goals. GIA is grateful to the Gates Foundation for their partnership in our network’s pursuit to collectively impact educational and economic success for students, and transform the region .