Education

The University of North Texas has received the largest gift in its history with a $22 million pledge from a former student from Thailand. The Denton, Texas school said Monday the gift from Charn Uswochoke is intended for professorships, academic chairs, scholarships and programs for the school's music, engineering and business colleges.

icouldbe.org, an online mentoring program for at-risk middle and high school students, today announced that E*TRADE Bank has renewed its support of the nonprofit organization, marking the ninth consecutive year. E*TRADE will provide icouldbe.org with a one-year grant of $300,000 to fund the organization’s online youth mentoring programs in low-income communities in New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., San Diego and Los Angeles.

Adrian Sargeant, the Robert F. Hartsook Professor of Fundraising at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University for the past five years, is taking a two-year, unpaid leave of absence to work on a variety of research projects.

Sargeant says he will work as an independent consultant while also conducting pro-bono research, and has the "potential to go back" to Indiana as the Hartsook Chair, which is believed to be the only endowed chair in fundraising anywhere.

Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors has announced a first round of grants through its California Education Policy Fund (CEPF) to organizations working to advance education policy reform in California.

Totaling $3.73 million over three years, the nine grants will support efforts to boost student achievement and college success, especially among underserved students. Established earlier this year with a $3.5 million gift from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and overseen by RPA, the fund aims to support an "ecosystem" of advocacy groups that can engage a broad array of stakeholders to effect policy changes at the state level.

A Cincinnati-area nonprofit organization is assisting high school students throughout the Tri-State in not only giving to charity, but learning more about the spirit of philanthropy and social causes. Magnified Giving, a nonprofit organization based in the Cincinnati suburb of Reading, enters its fourth year of teaching students to become philanthropists through placing the decision of what charities to donate funds to upon the shoulders of students.

The program allows students and teachers in 15 area high schools to form Youth Grantmaking Councils charged with dispersing a grant of at least $1,000 to charities.

The Walton Family Foundation has announced a three-year, $49.5 million grant to Teach for America to help double the size of its national teaching corps and provide professional development for first- and second-year educators in seven communities located in the foundation's priority investment regions.

The investment by the foundation makes it TFA's largest private donor and will support the organization's efforts to recruit up to 15,000 recent college graduates to teach for two years in urban and rural public schools by 2015.

Hamilton College has received its largest gift ever — from a foundation headed by the inventor of an anti-cancer drug who planned to be a writer when he came to the college in 1942.

"I went to Hamilton to major in English,” recalled Edward Taylor, who is giving $16 million to the college through his SunUp Foundation. “I was required to take a science course in my first semester. I flipped a coin and it turned out to be chemistry instead of biology. I owe my lifelong fascination with chemistry to Hamilton.”

The NBCUniversal Foundation has awarded $800,000 in grants to nonprofit organizations across the country. The grants are part of NBCUniversal’s ongoing commitment to improving public secondary education in underserved communities.

This is the sixth year of the successful NBCUniversal initiative, which targets nonprofits in cities with large NBCUniversal employee populations and significant education needs. Since the Foundation’s inception, close to $7 million has been directed to nonprofits that have demonstrated a commitment to improving educational opportunities for public school students in the 6th through 12th grades.

Public school systems around the country may have spent the past several years starving for cash in this financially troubled era, but a new report shows that philanthropists doled out $684 million in private grants from 2000-08 to organizations involved in reforming the teaching profession.

The analysis, the first comprehensive examination of philanthropy activity in this area, showed that the biggest chunk of the money — 38 percent — went to teacher recruitment, while 22 percent was spent on professional development, 14 percent on teacher preparation and less than 10 percent for everything else.

MasterCard Worldwide announced a $1 million grant to the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) to support entrepreneurship education programs geared toward middle and high school students in low-income communities across the United States.

The MasterCard grant will support NFTE’s core U.S. school-based youth entrepreneurship program that provides hands-on learning and classroom lessons on mathematics, analytical skills and management and planning. MasterCard employees will also have an opportunity to get involved as volunteer educators.