The Foundation is a private operating foundation — not a grantmaking foundation. We don't run an open call for proposals and we don't make grants to organizations or individuals we haven't worked with directly. Our work is the work: we design, fund, and run our own programs alongside long-term partners.
That said, we read every email. The fastest way to get a response is to tell us specifically what you do and what you need — a paragraph is plenty to start. Most of our partnerships have started through a former student, a fellow researcher, or someone already inside a community we wanted to learn from.
If you're a teacher, school leader, university faculty member, or community organizer running CS, AI, or entrepreneurship programming in an underserved community, we'd like to hear from you. Tell us where you're working, what you're trying to build, and what you most need.
The Foundation makes mission-related investments in companies and funds whose work expands access to technical education, scientific research, or entrepreneurship in underserved communities. We invest at small check sizes and follow-on selectively.
We occasionally co-fund research at the intersection of education, entrepreneurship, and institutional context. We're particularly interested in field-experimental and quasi-experimental work in underserved communities, where the research itself is conducted in genuine partnership with the people it studies.
Most of the programs you'll find on this site started through a former student, a research collaborator, or someone working inside a community we wanted to learn from. We tend to spend a year or more in conversation and exploratory visits before we commit to anything substantial, because we'd rather build a small number of long partnerships well than spread thinly across many.
If you're approaching us cold, the most useful thing you can do is point us to evidence we can read — a published evaluation, a longitudinal outcome, a randomized study, or a track record of program operation. Our Evidence & reading page lays out the questions we ask before we get involved.
As a private operating foundation, our charitable activity is the direct operation of our programs — not the disbursement of grants to other nonprofits. No unsolicited proposals, no application process.
Important work, but not what a small operating foundation is structured to do well. We refer these inquiries to scholarship organizations with the selection infrastructure for them.
We support programs with a credible practitioner running them and preliminary evidence the model works in context. We don't fund speculation — even our own — without a small pilot first.
In every community where we operate, we partner with an existing local organization that has trust, presence, and continuity we couldn't build from outside.
Wrong scale and operating model for capital projects. We focus on program operations and program-related research.
A new partnership is a multi-year commitment. We open new geographies rarely, and only when there's a clear, durable reason to be there.
We name these limits to save your time. If your work doesn't fit one of the three pathways above, the most useful thing we can usually do is point you to other funders or practitioners who would.
Per Foundation policy, honoraria from Chuck’s external talks are redirected to the Foundation and re-deployed into programming. A short reflection from a recent engagement makes the loop explicit.
Tell us who you are, where you work, and what you'd like to discuss. We read everything that comes in, and we follow up when there's a fit.
We aim to respond within two weeks. Please be patient — we're a small foundation.
