2025 Grants
THE GIRLS’ MIDDLE SCHOOL (PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA)
The Foundation has supported programs at The Girls’ Middle School since 2010. This year, we’re happy to continue our support of a special robotics program plus two fun new programs.
Robotics competition
For the third year, we will support a special robotics team in the VEX Robotics competition. The six members of this team are 7th and 8th grade students from GMS’s Bennett Scholars Program, which supports high-achieving girls from under-resourced communities with full scholarships and wraparound support for their three years at The Girls’ Middle School.
At the start of each school year, each team receives a basic prototype robot. To prepare for competitions throughout the season, students continually enhance their robot to increase its scoring capabilities based on their own unique design ideas. Each student is encouraged to take on a role within the team -- builder, coder, note taker, driver, etc. Teams meet twice per week, for a total of three hours per week to collaborate, receive mentorship from established Silicon Valley professionals, and learn from each other. Returning students are considered area experts and share their knowledge and experience with new members, who actively seek their advice on robot assembly and engineering documentation best practices.
GMS had this to say about the VEX program: “Central to who GMS is, our VEX Robotics program is one of the key ways we encourage young girls to explore the world of STEM as a vehicle to unleash their potential and shape our world.”
Our $7500 grant will cover the program’s operating costs such as team registration, essential electronics, materials like sensors and pneumatics that provide a competitive edge, and replacement parts.
Poker math programming
In recent years, author and psychologist Maria Konnikova has brought national attention to the value of poker as a tool for building confidence, strategic thinking, and resilience — especially for women and girls. Through her journey from novice player to championship-level competitor, Konnikova has emphasized how poker cultivates essential life skills: assessing risk, managing uncertainty, making clear decisions under pressure, and recovering quickly from setbacks. Her advocacy underscores that when girls learn poker, they are not simply playing a game; they are practicing leadership behaviors that translate directly to academic, social, and professional success.
During GMS’s twice-yearly, week-long “intersession” program, traditional academics are paused for students to explore new subjects and skills through hands-on, experiential learning. This year, GMS will offer a class where girls will explore the connections between poker and math principles, including probability, expected value, combinatorics, and pattern recognition. Beyond math, students will also practice key social-emotional competencies such as emotional regulation, strategic patience, ethical decision-making, and the confidence to advocate for themselves at the table. It will be a learning environment where girls can take intellectual risks and grow their strategic thinking through play.
Our grant of $545 will support the entire week-long class, serving 12-16 students across all three grades.
Individual mini-microscopes
In 7th grade, GMS students use a large shared microscope to examine prepared slides. However, their time with this equipment is limited, as many students must share one device during each class period. Foldscopes — portable, durable mini-microscopes — allow every student to have direct, hands-on access to scientific tools, dramatically expanding opportunities for inquiry-based learning. In just seconds, a flat sheet of paper can be folded into a fully functional microscope with 140x magnification, giving students the freedom to explore the microscopic world on their own terms. Its lightweight, on-the-go design encourages learners to move beyond the traditional classroom setting: students can take their Foldscopes outside to investigate soil composition, water quality, leaf structures, or insect life, fostering a deeper understanding of local ecology and strengthening their connection to the land around them.
With their own device in hand, GMS girls will learn how to collect and prepare field samples, observe microbial and structural differences across environments, and compare their real-time discoveries to what they see using the school’s high-powered microscope — reinforcing core skills in scientific method, observation, analysis, and data interpretation.
Students can use their Foldscopes both at school and at home. This take-home component significantly extends learning time, empowering students to pursue self-directed investigations, share discoveries with their families, and build confidence as young scientists.
The Foundation’s grant of $315 will provide every GMS 7th grader, approximately 68 students, with an individual Foldscope.
STUDENT LEADERSHIP NETWORK (NEW YORK CITY)
We have supported Student Leadership Network (and its predecessor organizations) with a variety of grants since 2007 and we're happy to continue our support again this year. Hundreds of young women get a quality single-sex education at these schools across New York City.
STEM career day
TYWLS’s “Big Red STEM Day” brings together approximately 140 students from the six TYWLS schools to explore STEM careers through a full-day immersive experience. Throughout the day, students engage in hands-on activities, participate in workshops hosted by Cornell graduate students, and listen to a panel of experts. The day culminates in a science symposium where students share their own STEM projects, including research boards from summer science programs and materials from robotics programming. This program is particularly effective at engaging students in cutting-edge STEM fields and has proven successful at inspiring long-term career aspirations in areas such as engineering, medicine, and technology.
Our grant of $3000 will support the program for all 140 students.
Ecology field trip
TYWLS’s “Seeds to Trees” program provides outdoor field experiences and hands-on classroom activities for approximately 70 middle school students at the TYWLS Bronx school. Students are introduced to science and nature in fun and engaging ways, including studying biodiversity, urban wildlife, forest ecology, and healthy waterways. Students learn to identify invertebrates and use tools such as binoculars to observe and identify local plants and animals. The program has proven particularly effective at engaging students who previously struggled with traditional science instruction, making science accessible and enjoyable while reinforcing that learning can happen within their own communities.
The Foundation’s grant of $1500 will support the program for all 70 students.
GIRLS ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP ACADEMY (LOS ANGELES)
The Girls Academic Leadership Academy in Los Angeles (GALA) is the first (and only) all-girls STEM-focused public school in California. We’ve supported them for several years in the past and this year are happy to support four programs this year.
Mathematics competition fees
The American Mathematics Competition (AMC), which is sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America, is a “national effort to strengthen the mathematical capabilities of our next generation of innovators. By challenging students with engaging problems, the AMC sets the stage for lifelong mathematical exploration, discovery, and achievement.” https://maa.org/student-programs/amc/.
This fall, GALA high school students participated in an AMC, and GALA middle school students will participate in an AMC competition in January. The Foundation grant of $450 will cover the fees for both competitions.
Student math platform
DeltaMath is a student-facing online platform used for practice problems in class and for homework. It allows for individualized assignments and accommodations, provides immediate feedback to students, and shows them solutions to problems. It also has the ability to create assignments tailored for classes to mix and match skills, and the ability to assign to groups and/or individuals. (See https://www.deltamath.com/teachers-schools for more information.)
The GALA math teachers consider DeltaMath to be superior to the software currently provided to the school through the Los Angeles Unified School District. A DeltaMath site license will cover all site-based teachers.
Our $1800 grant will provide a site license that will support all of GALA’s math teachers.
Financial literacy event for middle-schoolers
As we have for the past four years, we’ll support the “Reality Store” event this year. The Reality Store is a financial simulation that teaches financial planning, goal setting, decision making, and career planning. After several weeks of preparing materials and training student managers, teachers will introduce students to basic financial planning concepts in classroom preparation sessions. After the classroom component, the students will all participate in the Reality Store event, which consists of 15-20 booths. Each student will visit the booths (“stores”), including the one they helped build, with a mock debit card and checkbook. Each booth represents an aspect of adult life where money is involved, e.g., Banking, Investments, Housing, Utilities, Child Care, Insurance, and so on. When students visit a particular booth, they’ll have to spend money for that service or necessity, and deduct that amount from their paycheck or bank account. By visiting the booths (some of which are mandatory, and some of which are optional), the students learn about making wise financial decisions, and learn how much money they might need to make as an adult to sustain a particular lifestyle.
Along the way, the students calculate after-tax monthly salaries, percentages of income that must be spent on basic necessities, loan payments, and interest rates. The program helps students see math in a practical light and highlights the importance of math in their everyday lives. It’s a great fit for the Foundation, and we’re happy to support it again.
Each year produces priceless reactions from the girls. Here are few from last year:
"Pets cost THIS much?"
"Wait, this is how much a doctor pays?" (Students did not realize that being a doctor requires additional years of schooling after undergrad.)
"Being an adult is not so cool anymore."
The grant is for $3000, which will benefit 350 students.
Financial literacy event for high-schoolers
GALA’s curriculum includes an Economics class for High School Seniors. As part of the class, 83 GALA Seniors will participate in the “JA Finance Park” with Junior Achievement of Southern California. The programming consists of a 12-lesson classroom curriculum in personal finance, a field trip to the Finance Park, and a post-trip classroom debrief. At the Finance Park, the set-up is similar to Reality Store (see above): each student is provided a tablet with a randomly generated persona with details of their “adult life,” including job title, annual salary, age, marital status, debt, savings and credit score. The students visit various “storefronts” corresponding to monthly budget line items. The big difference between this high-school-level experience and the Reality Store is that the booths are staffed by volunteers from local businesses: for example, the students can talk to a real Bank of America employee at the storefront for home loans, a real Capital One employee to apply for a student loan, a real Toyota employee to explore car pricing, and so on — and in the process learn which purchases are realistic based on their persona’s salary and credit score. It’s a great way to step up to the next level of financial literacy. You can find more details here: https://jasocal.org/finance-park/
Foundation funds of $3635 will be used for all 83 students in the program.