What We’ve Learned by Investing $52 Million in Black and Latino Innovators
Stacey Childress, CEO, NewSchools Venture Fund
At NewSchools, we believe the genius to create a more effective and equitable education system already exists in our communities, and that innovators must have the support they need to nurture and grow their ideas for impact. Recently we announced Frances Messano’s promotion to President and shared our strategy for the next three years, which builds on what we’ve been learning since 2015. A core part of our approach has been increasing our investments in leaders of color.
Between 2015 and 2020, our teams provided $52.1 million to Black and Latino education innovators, which represents half of our total dollars invested during that span. These trailblazers started new district and charter schools across the country, created organizations that cultivate diverse leaders and teachers, and developed learning solutions designed for equity. When we include all leaders who identify as a person of color, the total investment tops $63 million.
We typically don’t make splashy announcements about the size of our investments and these were made by multiple teams over six years. So when we aggregated the numbers recently, even some folks on our team were a little surprised by the scale of the total investment in leaders of color.
We decided to share the dollar amount openly because where we’re headed next is deeply influenced by our journey so far. We diversified our team and board — leaders of color now make up around half of each. We retooled how we develop funding pipelines and how we select and support grantees. In 2014, around 10% of our active grantees were people of color; in 2020, 51% of our investments identified as Black or Latino. Nearly all of our grants are unrestricted, so leaders can use the dollars in the way they deem best. We partner with them to strengthen their organizations, raise additional funds, and learn together.
And we’ve learned so much. Here are three big lessons that helped shape our next chapter:
- When the pool of innovators is more diverse, so are the ideas.
Until 2015, NewSchools primarily invested in schools that had similar features, which over time became known as “no-excuses” schools. Then we announced we were looking for a broader array of district and charter schools developed in partnership with communities and designed to support every student’s academic and social emotional learning. We said we wanted to fund many more leaders of color to design and launch them. The early response was, well, tepid. People still saw us as who we had always been. But we stuck with it. As we built new relationships and consistently matched our actions with our words, the flow of diverse people and ideas climbed steadily.
We’ve now funded more than 100 innovative schools that currently serve students or are still in the planning stages. Forty-three percent of the founders are Black or Latino, with more than 50% identifying as leaders of color. They include arts academies, single gender STEM middle schools, career-focused high schools, and many more models. As a group, they outpace national growth norms and outperform schools near them that serve similar students. You can learn more about each of them on our website. We’ve seen this rich diversity of ideas and approaches grow across all of our investment areas.
2. We had to rethink our model to be a trusted partner to leaders of color.
A number of reports, news articles, and first-hand accounts have highlighted the inequitable, often painful, experiences leaders of color have with philanthropy. The patterns are deep and longstanding. Our organization played a part in this inequity and pain in our space for many years. In addition to a funding gap, the non-financial supports we provide — coaching, connections, convening — had not been designed to break down the traditional dynamics between funders and grantees or address the specific needs of leaders of color.
We committed to doing better. Over time, we grew our understanding of the types of support Black and Latino innovators found most helpful and developed deeper relationships so they could be more open with us about their needs and aspirations. We created strong community within our portfolios, which fostered safe environments for sharing and learning with each other. These changes led to high marks for our non-financial support and communities of practice. As word spread about the shifts, we saw a marked increase in Black and Latino innovators in our pipeline. We solicit input from portfolio members regularly, and they shed light on their experience with comments such as, “NewSchools has been such a great partner in our growth and development as an organization. They were never judgmental of our mistakes, and always knew what support to provide when we needed it.” Another leader shared that we feel “more like a partner AND a funder. Relationships with other funders have not always transcended those boundaries.” Though we’ve come a long way in the last six years, we know we still have room for growth and are committed to continuous improvement.
3. Starting big isn’t required to create impact over time.
I noted earlier that splashy announcements haven’t been our style. But this lesson runs deeper than how we communicate. Sometimes grant makers think they have to allocate large dollar amounts to get traction on a new priority. We’ve discovered that when we enter a new space where we have much to learn, smaller exploratory investments can help us develop insights, credibility, and trust. If we generate momentum, we can make larger commitments to more innovators over time.
Our Diverse Leaders portfolio is a clear example of this approach. In 2016, we launched this area with an $800,000 budget, which our team deployed to six organizations focused on diversifying senior leadership in education. By building relationships with these innovators, the team better understood further opportunities for impact and broadened the scope of their portfolio to include diversifying teachers and leaders at all levels. Since then, we’ve invested $15.5 million in 54 organizations, which have gone on to raise more than $90 million from other sources. This has created a powerful model for how we enter new areas going forward.
As we begin our next chapter, one of our themes is, “We’re on to something, and we have so much more to do.” We aim to invest more than $100 million over the next three years, continuing to grow the percentage that flows to leaders of color so they can bring to life their ideas for making education more effective and equitable.
Next week, we will be announcing a new portfolio that builds on these lessons and takes our work in an exciting direction. Be on the lookout for the announcement from Frances Messano and help us spread the word!
