The NEA Foundation for the Improvement of Education

The NEA Foundation's mission is to improve public education for all students. We offer funding and other resources to public school educators, their schools, and their districts to solve complex teaching and learning challenges to prepare each of America's children to learn and thrive in a rapidly changing world.

We award Grants to Educators, supporting classroom projects that enhance teaching and learning, or offsetting the cost of professional development for educators. We lead a professional development, cohort-based program annually, called the Global Learning Fellowship, for NEA member educators who want to deepen their global competence and explore how to apply it to classroom instruction. In addition, we seek to bring high-quality, project-based STEM instruction to high-need districts and extract knowledge proof points about how best to engage educators in the design and implementation of such initiatives.

Bringing with her over twenty years of leadership experience in the education and philanthropic sectors, Sara A. Sneed joined the NEA Foundation as President and CEO in early 2019. She and the NEA Foundation senior leadership team possess the deep knowledge and skills needed to advance the Foundation’s strategic priorities through grant-making, technical assistance, program evaluation, and knowledge dissemination.

These programs include our Global Learning Fellowship, designed to develop educators’ knowledge and skills in order to integrate global competency into their classroom instruction, advocate for global competency in their schools and districts, and help students thrive in an increasingly interconnected world. Through our STEM initiative, we award multi-year grants for programs that increase access to and improve the quality of STEM education in underserved communities. Finally, through our Grants to Educators program, we directly fund educator conceived and led projects to enhance improve classroom instruction or for professional development. Our external panel of grant reviewers is comprised of educators, subject matter experts, and other members of the education community.

From incorporating educator expertise into our program design and implementation and decision- making through educator representation on our Board of Directors, to our interaction with educators who are the beneficiary of our grants and Fellowships in regard to their applications and reporting requirements, the NEA Foundation staff are accustomed to working with educators from diverse backgrounds.

During the NEA Foundation’s past fiscal year, our programs served nearly 6,000 educators and 117,000 students, and made advancements in programs including:

STEM: The Foundation’s investments are designated to under-resourced school districts to improve access to comprehensive, project-based STEM curriculum to both engage and encourage students to incorporate STEM learnings into their daily lives and academic careers. First round grants were previously awarded in Greeley, CO and Hamilton County, TN. Second round grants are set to be announced in Fall 2019.

Grants to Educators: 109 grants have been awarded reaching close to 108,000 students and nearly 6,000 educators. 34 grantees posted their lesson plans on an open source forum available to educators nationwide.

Global Learning Fellows: The Foundation’s 2019 class of Fellows was comprised of 46 educators from across the country and impacted nearly 9,500 students. In 2018 the Foundation, was proud to have published its first book, 12 Lessons to Open Classrooms and Minds to the World, of which to-date nearly 200 have been purchased. The lesson plans in the book were devised and tested by the 2018 cohort of Global Learning Fellows. It is available in both e-reader and hard copy formats and is accessible on Amazon.com. The 2020 cohort of Fellows is comprised of 44 public school educators from across the nation.

The Foundation continues to refine its metrics and to identify opportunities to share programmatic learnings more broadly.