Education

Kohl's Department Stores announced a new partnership with TED, the nonprofit organization that provides a platform for innovative thinkers to present Ideas Worth Spreading. Kohl's is providing a $1.25 million sponsorship to launch education-based opportunities for youth.

Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland has announced $80 million in gifts as part of a recently launched $1 billion fundraising campaign, including a $50 million pledge from the Weatherhead Foundation in nearby Beachwood, Ohio.

The Weatherhead pledge — the largest single financial commitment to the university in its history — will be split evenly between the Weatherhead School of Management and the new Weatherhead Institute for Family Medicine and Community Health.

Reeher LLC announced that Haverford College has joined the Reeher Platform, a software service for higher education fundraising management. The private Haverford, Penn.-based college, which serves approximately 1,200 students and more than 13,000 alumni, parents and friends, is using the Reeher Platform to increase retention of donors to its Annual Fund, as well as identify and predict the best new prospects.

UNLV received a $15 million donation from the Ted and Doris Lee family to bolster business education. The donation is among the largest individual gifts to a college or school in UNLV’s 54-year history and the largest private donation in support of faculty endowments.

It comes at a time when state funding for UNLV has dropped by about $73 million over the past few years, leading to the elimination of 19 degree and school programs this year.

With billions of philanthropic dollars flowing into higher education each year, careful allocation of funds, based on specific community needs, is required in order to achieve maximum impact, a new study says.

To help national and community foundations better allocate their higher-education dollars, the Institute for Higher Education Policy has developed a framework for categorizing U.S. metropolitan areas based on their specific higher-education needs.

Calling it a major “investment” in its future, the Golda Och Academy announced a $17.2 million bequest from the estate of the late philanthropist Eric F. Ross.

Ross, who died in September 2010 at the age of 91, was a major supporter of the Conservative day school. Its upper school campus in West Orange, N.J. is named in his honor in recognition of a donation he made that led to the opening of the campus in 1991.

The Carnegie Corporation of New York has announced nearly $20 million in funding from a dozen corporate and foundation partners in support of 100Kin10, a multi-sector initiative developed by Carnegie in collaboration with Opportunity Equation to prepare, deploy, and support 100,000 STEM teachers over the next ten years.

Since the initiative's launch at the Clinton Global Initiative America meeting in Chicago earlier this year, more than eighty partners have joined the effort.

Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis and Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter announced nearly $500 million in grants to community colleges around the country for targeted training and workforce development to help economically dislocated workers who are changing careers. The grants support partnerships between community colleges and employers to develop programs that provide pathways to good jobs, including building instructional programs that meet specific industry needs.

Administrators at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School said they plan to build an advanced science and math facility with a $21.5 million donation, the largest in the school's history.

MICDS, an independent college prepatory school in Ladue, Mo., announced the gift from the James McDonnell family.

The gift also is the second largest to a grade or high school in the region, behind a $28 million donation in November 2009 to Chaminade College Prep.

The California Charter Schools Association has received a $15-million grant from the Walton Family Foundation to add 20,000 more charter school students in Los Angeles and 100,000 statewide.

The grant is the largest by far to the California Charter Schools Assn., and also the largest of its kind from the nonprofit established by the founders of the Wal-Mart Corp.