Higher Achievement Receives $3 Million From Atlantic Philanthropies to Expand Into Baltimore

Original Source Higher Achievement, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that provides middle school children from underserved areas year-round academic enrichment programs, has announced a three-year, $3 million grant from Atlantic Philanthropies to help expand its out-of-school-time (OST) programs to Baltimore. The grant will enable the organization, which serves more than four hundred students in the district and Alexandria, Virginia, to establish a program in Baltimore for a hundred students next summer and to expand the program to five hundred students by 2012. Higher Achievement selected Baltimore as its first replication site for a number of reasons: need and demand, support from the public school system, the availability of high school placement spots, the potential for recruiting talented staff and volunteers, and financial support from partners, individual donors and philanthropic entities, and the local community. The organization will also conduct a study in partnership with Public/Private Ventures to evaluate the program’s effectiveness, identify practices that can be shared with other organizations, and consider the potential of year-round OST programs for economically disadvantaged students. “Out-of-school time programming provides students with the additional support they need to achieve,” said Nicole Gallant, program executive at Atlantic Philanthropies, which will fund the study in collaboration with the William T. Grant Foundation. “Higher Achievement has served relatively few students extremely well with a high-quality, comprehensive program and is now in a position to serve many more students with the same quality during those pivotal hours.” Higher Achievement Expands to Baltimore, MD, Part of Vision to Serve More Middle-School Students. Higher Achievement Press Release 5/28/08.