The Foundation supports efforts to expand educational opportunities at all levels. We are particularly interested in programs that:

• Encourage a love of learning early, before children reach kindergarten.
• Strengthen the teaching profession through technology training and other professional development opportunities.
• Increase educational choice through charter schools and scholarships to private secondary schools, vocational schools, colleges and universities.
• Encourage girls and young women to prepare for and achieve careers in math, science and technology.
• Motivate all students to achieve and gain the skills that allow them to reach their academic and career goals, including vocational training.

Featured Grants:

Eastside College Preparatory School  |  www.eastside.org

Mission: Eastside College Preparatory School is committed to opening new doors for students historically underrepresented in higher education. Eastside's challenging and engaging curriculum enables students to discover their intellectual strengths, sharpen their academic skills, and embrace new opportunities in a culture of learning that supports the potential of every student to enter and succeed in a four-year college and beyond.

Vision: Eastside students who are the first in their families to go to college create a ripple effect, changing their own lives, the lives of their families, and the life of their community.

The Need: Eastside College Preparatory School is located in East Palo Alto, a community where a complex set of social factors results in 65% of teenagers dropping out of school.  Eastside provides a rigorous college preparatory curriculum for grades 6 through 12, designed to serve:

• Students who will be first in their family to go to college.
• Students from groups who are underrepresented in college (Latino, African American, Pacific Islander).

Eastside is an independent non-profit school where all students are on full scholarship supported by generous donations from individuals, corporations and foundations. This support enables Eastside to provide over 225 students with:

• An extended school day, keeping our students engaged in educational activities from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and often later.
• Residential option for those who will benefit from a more studious environment.
• Alumni support through college and beyond.

Boarding Program: In July 2007, with support from the Morgan Family Foundation, Eastside completed construction of its new residence hall – the last component of their campus expansion project. Eastside now has a girls’ dorm and a boys’ dorm, which addresses the need for some students to live on campus in a supportive and stable environment.  The boys’ dorm, Cornell House, is named for the alma mater of Jim and Becky Morgan, whose family foundation made this program possible.

The results: Since its founding in1996, 100% of Eastside's graduates have gone on to four-year colleges. They also provide support and guidance to all their alumni, most of whom are the first in their family to go to college, and face challenges unique to first-generation college students. As a result of the alumni support program, 77% of Eastside graduates have either completed college or are on-track to complete four-year college degrees.

Eastside alumni have now graduated from schools such as Princeton University, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and Pomona College. The first Eastside alumnus to earn a graduate degree received his master’s degree in natural resources from American University in 2008.

A Student Reflects: “I chose to better myself through education. Going to Eastside from 8 to 5 and taking advanced classes while participating in extra curricular activities and meeting my obligations to my family at the same time has always been difficult, but it all contributes to my preparation for college. I know that there are more things to look forward to in the future: I will be able to guide my brothers through the college process after I experience it, rather than spending the rest of my days in jail or taking care of my own kids as a teenager all because I was not smart enough to value opportunities.”

Bring Me a Book | www.bringmeabook.org

Bring Me A Book – Sacramento Region Expansion

Bring Me A Book‘s mission is to provide easy access to the best children’s books and to inspire reading aloud in children. Through its Preschool Library Initiative, Bring Me A Book provides two integrated programs, the Bookcase Library and First Teachers workshops, to state-funded preschools and childcare centers in the most underserved communities of California through its regional offices in the Silicon Valley, Sacramento, Oakland, Stockton, Novato, and Long Beach/Los Angeles.

• The Bookcase Library program provides bookcases of age-appropriate, culturally diverse hardback books to increase the amount and quality of read-aloud time in preschool classroom. Frequent exposure to interactive read-aloud time is a critical component to developing pre-reading and literacy skills which lead to future reading and school success.  
• The First Teachers Program provides workshops that engage and educate parents, childcare providers and teachers on the critical importance of reading aloud to children. Through interaction and dialogue, participants develop individualized solutions to overcome the challenges of daily read-aloud routines.

Since 2007, the Morgan Family Foundation has helped Bring Me A Book expand its Preschool Library Initiative to the Greater Sacramento Region by providing a two-year grant supporting all regional start-up and operational costs and 50% of program expenses.  Bring Me A Book has partnered with six school districts spanning two counties. As a result, over 60 classrooms will receive Bookcase Libraries, impacting 4,000+ preschool-aged children over a two-year period. More than 450 parents have attended a First Teachers workshop, reaching over 1,000 children who live in their households.

An independent evaluation study by Applied Survey Research indicates Bring Me A Book’s preschool programs have an impact on the parents’ and teachers’ read aloud practices and children’s early literacy skills:

• Parents better understood the importance of reading aloud.
• Parents spent twice as much time reading to their children.
• Teachers increased their read-aloud activities and children expressed more enjoyment and interest in books.

As a result: Children’s early literacy skills improved by over 30%.

The long-term goal of Bring Me A Book in the Sacramento region is to implement the Preschool Library Initiative at each of the 180+ state-funded preschools across four counties: Sacramento, Placer, Yolo and El Dorado and at all the state-funded preschools and child development centers in California.        

Bring Me A Book and Planned Parenthood Teen Success Partnership

The Morgan Foundation has also provided seed funding for a partnership between Bring Me A Book and the Planned Parenthood Teen Success program. Over the past two years, Bring Me A Book has trained the Teen Success facilitators in all of the Planned Parenthood Mar Monte sites in California and Nevada, and additional Planned Parenthood sites in Elmira, New York; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara, California on Bring Me A Book’s First Teachers read aloud workshop. Bring Me A Book has also provided the sites with its “First Teachers in a Box’ training materials and curriculum and high quality, hardback books to pass out to the teen mothers at the end of the trainings.  This “train the trainer” approach ensures that the First Teachers workshop is an embedded program in the Teen Success program. 

New Teacher Center | www.newteachercenter.org

The New Teacher Center (NTC) opened in 1998 with a mission "to improve student learning by supporting the development of an inspired, dedicated, and highly qualified teaching force." NTC’s work helps to transform the lives of new teachers and administrators through intensive, mentor-based induction, reversing long-standing neglect of new teacher development. This mission was established based on the need to ensure that every new teacher in the country has the highest level of support. NTC has since become the nation’s foremost organization working in the area of new teacher and principal support through its emphasis on practice, policy, and research.

Teacher Induction - With Morgan Family Foundation support, the NTC has successfully developed training modules and resources to help certify new teachers in the 160 California Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment (BTSA) programs in the following content areas: content and pedagogy; technology; equity; health and safety; English learners; and special populations. These resources and training will advance mentor practice by helping to improve teaching and learning in the classrooms of 1,000 first and second-year teachers in the Santa Cruz/Silicon Valley region. They will similarly improve mentor practice in the more than 100 school districts throughout California served by BTSA Induction Programs using the NTC Formative Assessment System for new teachers. We believe this is a substantial contribution to improving education in California, particularly for English Learner students and students with special needs.

School Leadership - Through Morgan Family Foundation funding, the NTC School Leadership Division is developing training modules and resources to build the capacity of school principals as instructional leaders. These principal supports will include a guide for ongoing professional development of school leadership coaches, a Professional Learning Communities module, and a series of tools to enhance coaches understanding of formative assessment, certification, and evaluation. These materials and tools will impact school leadership coaches' ability to enhance the skills and knowledge of school principals to function as highly effective instruction leaders and provide their new teachers with guidance and support.