2020 Grants

SAN FRANCISCO GIRLS’ SCHOOL (SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA)

 Online STEM Education Platform Infrastructure

 SFGS is a new all-girls STEM-focused independent high school that will open its doors in the Richmond district of San Francisco in 2021. As part of its STEM focus, SFGS will host a STEM Education Center. The Center’s mission will be “to serve as an incubator for innovative STEM coursework, designed specifically for girls, and to share that for free through an online platform to a national consortium of public girls’ schools.” SFGS has already developed some content for the Center: a live-streamed interactive speaker series showcasing women in enriching STEM jobs. The speakers “are predominantly young women of color, many from low-income or immigrant backgrounds, who overcame numerous barriers to accomplish their goals.” Empowering students in this way, for free, is a great fit for the Foundation’s mission.

In order to operate the Center, SFGS needs a special online platform that will enable teachers and students to upload documents and videos, view course materials, create course modules and portfolios of student work, and interact with each other through the platform. They have selected an industry-tested platform called Canvas. This year, the Foundation will pay $5,000 to support the subscription for the platform software, which we expect to benefit hundreds of young women. 

GIRLS ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP ACADEMY (LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA)

Last year, we gave our first grants to the Girls Academic Leadership Academy in Los Angeles. GALA is the first (and only) all-girls STEM-focused public school in California. Located in central Los Angeles, it provides young women from diverse backgrounds with science, math, and technology classes at every grade level, as well as college counseling. GALA's mission is a great fit for the Foundation, and we're happy to have found them! This year we will support two programs at GALA.  

“E-textiles” for Computer Science Class

Computer science classes are mandatory for all Ninth and Tenth Grade students at GALA. In one of the curriculum units, students explore electronic textiles (e-textiles). This is a hands-on project that the students design, integrate and execute. Most of the e-textiles are used up each time, so they must be purchased every year. This year, the Foundation will provide 53 kits (for 106 students), plus related materials, for a total of $5,100. 

Materials for Aerospace Elective

This past fall, GALA offered an elective that introduces students to the aerospace industry, which plays an important role in the Southern California economy. The course includes lessons on the physics of flight and the different types of satellites and orbits. Hands-on projects include basic rocketry, vehicle and payload design, and aerodynamic wind tunnel testing of a flying toy plane. This year, $2,570 of Foundation funds will provide 40 students with flight simulation software, basic rocketry kits, a rocket engine, and a drone kit. 

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 with three valuable programs.

Build-A-Circuit Kits

As we have for several years in the past, this year we will support GMS’s use of Chibitronic circuit kits. The kits, which were designed by a woman affiliated with the MIT Media Lab, help instructors explain how electrical gates -- the basis of all computer chips -- work. The girls build several simple circuits for themselves, connecting batteries and LEDs in various ways with conductive copper tape (no soldering required). As GMS noted, “for many girls, this is their very first experience making an electronic circuit and these materials make abstract concepts accessible, understandable, and lead to successful completion.”

The students take home their completed projects at the end of the unit and can use them as personalized reference guides. This year, we will fund 64 kits, for the entire Eighth Grade class, for a total of $1,660.

At-Home Science Kits for Remote Learning

Science curricula rely heavily on hands-on experimentation but this has been greatly disrupted by this year’s quarantine requirements. GMS is meeting this challenge by creating kits for the students to work with at home. In the Sixth Grade science units “Earth in Space” and “Balanced Biomes” units, students learn about the events that lead to the formation of our solar system, planet, and the origin of life. They also discover why an ecosystem works the way it does by exploring the complicated history of natural and artificial processes, culminating in each student developing their own ecosystem. Foundation funds will be used to acquire owl pellets (to dissect, for the study of predation), rocket kits so the students can build and launch their own rockets, and bacteria garden kits. The grant is $1,505.

At-Home Mathematics Manipulatives

Tools like algebra tiles make abstract concepts concrete and help GMS teachers reach students of varying abilities. Used throughout the year to cover multiple concepts such as the distributive property, polynomials, and substitutions, having students retain access to these tiles at home during remote instruction is an essential part in laying the foundation of their mathematical understanding. Foundation funds of $2,316 will be used for tiles and other manipulatives, for the entire Sixth, Seventh, and Eight Grades (approximately 200 young women).

STUDENT LEADERSHIP NETWORK (NEW YORK CITY)

We have supported Student Leadership Network (and its predecessor organizations) with a variety of grants for the past eleven years 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.

At-Home Equipment for AP Environmental Science

Like our other schools, SLN is adapting to teaching science in a hands-on way with children who are stuck at home. This year, $4,661 of Foundation funds will purchase 55 lab equipment kits for students in Grades Eleven and Twelve to support the lab component of the AP Environmental Science course. The kits will be shipped to each student, and the students should be able to continue to use the kits when they eventually return to school.