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How Our Grantmaking Contributes to Helping Learners
When we make grants to partners, we’re consistently thinking about how we can maximize positive outcomes for learners from low-income backgrounds so they can achieve upward mobility. Ascendium contributes to change through the exploration, validation, and scaling of practices and models that can spark sustainable improvements to postsecondary education and workforce training systems.
Our exploration grants allow us and our partners to learn more about promising innovations that address persistent barriers for learners. As a funder, we're committed to spurring innovations where needed and then helping set up those reforms for effective evaluation. Many of our exploration grants involve piloting direct services to learners so that we and our partners can see what works and for whom.
Our validation grants support rigorous evaluations of promising innovations, reforms, or solutions. The insights from these grants help us understand where to invest further. They also guide others in their decision-making about where to allocate limited resources and which interventions are likely to bring about the desired results.
Our scaling grants aim to catalyze the widespread adoption of the most effective reforms and solutions. We know that even with strong evidence, not all solutions reach all learners who could potentially benefit from them. Scaling grants both directly support the expansion of proven models and target the enabling conditions necessary for their broader adoption.
A GROWING FOCUS ON VALIDATION
This year, we focused on growing our research and evaluation capacity to expand our investments in validation grants featuring an impact evaluation component.
We know well-constructed evidence is a critical tool for systems change. Rigorous, independent evaluation provides reliable information that practitioners and policymakers can use to make better decisions about how to allocate limited resources.
Through all our grantmaking, we hope to catalyze the adoption of the most effective solutions so that they reach the most learners possible. We can only accomplish that by creating evidence that others can use to drive large-scale change.
