John and Janice Wyatt Foundation

We are a newly founded family foundation that is just getting started in working with partners to level the playing field for disadvantaged you in the education space. The John & Janice Wyatt Foundation is a 501c(3) non-profit, grantmaking family foundation established in July 2018. We are intensely focused on creating equity and leveling the playing field for socially and economically disadvantaged children and youth in our geographic service area. Our focus is on early childhood education through high school – the cradle to career pathway – and our goal is to help these children stay engaged and become successful, active citizens in today’s rapidly evolving world.

If J2W Foundation wants to improve the readiness and preparation of economically disadvantaged elementary school students with the goal of achieving academic parity with their peers, as well as be more successful with the 3rd grade SOLs, a number of early interventions could be explored. These early interventions would raise the level of academic performance of targeted children during elementary school, which would increase readiness for SOL benchmarking in the 4th grade, thus improving the likelihood of academic achievement later in middle and high school, and therefore creating higher opportunities for success with high school graduations and post-high school citizenship.

To help close the achievement gap for the economically disadvantaged children within the community, one approach must be to focus resources and capacity on increasing access and improving quality early childhood education, while supplementing the school districts with high-attending, high-quality out-of-school time programming.

We will focus our resources on increasing access to, and improving the quality of, early childhood education; then wrap around high-quality, high attending out-of-school time programs to supplement the public schools and reinforce these early childhood gains.

Our four strategic buckets include:
• Developing a Collective Impact model that works in synchronicity with the entire community to facilitate a holistic, unified approach, targeted to improve educational outcomes for all children, with a focus on 3rd grade literacy.
• Increasing access to quality education for low-income children to reduce the opportunity gap.
• Improving the quality of existing public and private programs to deliver better results and reduce the achievement gap.
• Continually exploring other innovative approaches that have the potential to improve equity in education, and to be nimble and responsive to new ideas.

While we recognize our approach is not necessarily unique to the overall non-profit sector, we do believe we distinguish ourselves from many other similar organizations in several ways:

• We intend to develop deep relationships with our partners. We do not plan to write checks and hope the work on the ground gets done. We are intentional about understanding the key community challenges, we identify and research the existing organizations already doing the work and choose those we believe are (or can be) successful, we collaborate to develop the program design and implementation plan, and we share and analyze data to determine effectiveness and performance.
• We believe we already possess adequate financial resources to develop or enhance strong programs. Thus, we do not fundraise to bring revenue to our foundation. What we do is strive to bring along additional co-investors who believe the programs and partners we are working with have potential and are willing to consider layering their funding with ours to scale successful programs and to ultimately do more together.
• We act as objective brokers within communities. We work to facilitate community conversations, bring multi-sector partners together, and act as the catalyst for new ideas and opportunities.
• We believe we have a leadership team that complements one another and will help ensure we achieve the results we seek. We have expertise in building and running successful private industry; we have strong leadership in the non-profit sector; and we have extensive experience in K-12 education. Combined, we have the internal capacity to help propel communities forward with a new vision for the future but, ultimately, it will take much more than our investments to move the needle in a significant and sustainable way.

In 2020, we shifted our long-term strategies to a shorter-term COVID-19 response effort. To that end:
- Facilitated and organized all-day Learning Labs for students to have a safe space to do homework during the virtual learning year
- Support out-of-school time non-profits with bridge funding and summer camp resourcing
- Supported public school pre-k programs with take-home materials
- Assisted non-profits with acquiring CARES Act grant funding
- Funded virtual tutoring programs during the virtual school year

Also, we're now transitioning back to long-term programming:
- Bringing the Campaign for Grade Level Reading (collective impact program) to both Winchester, VA and Dorchester County, MD
- Funding a Virginia Pre-K Initiative classroom for Winchester, VA, adding 18 slots for new students
- Exploring a pilot Pre-K3 program for 3-year olds in Dorchester County, MD
- Piloting a CDA mentoring credentialing program in Fairfax County, VA
- Expanding ASQ developmental screening program in Fairfax County, VA
- Redesigning the in-school mentoring program for Fairfax County Public Schools
- Building capacity of an OST non-profit in Dorchester County, MD by funding their first-ever executive director
- Piloting a YMCA early learning readiness program in Dorchester County, MD
- Funding an Internet-for-All (reduce digital divide) program in Winchester, VA