$7.5M Awarded for Education, Workforce Innovation

Communities Foundation of Texas grants go to eight organizations

The Communities Foundation of Texas is awarding $7.5 million in grants to eight organizations supporting local education and workforce innovation.

“These organizations reflect the best of who we are,” said Kerri Briggs, executive director of CFT’s Educate Texas initiative.

Recipients are Aspire to Learn, AT LAST!, Café Momentum, The Commit Partnership – Dallas County Promise, Paul Quinn College, Texas Woman’s University, University of Texas at Arlington, and Year Up United.

 “They’re innovative, they’re compassionate, and they’re committed to lasting impacts in education and in our workforce,” Briggs said. “They’re building pathways to careers, redefining how we care for children outside of the classroom, accelerating economic mobility, and elevating higher ed.”

Briggs announced the eight grants on April 8 during a CFT program that included a panel discussion.

The funding is intended to help these institutions implement or strengthen learning environments, programs, and/or student outcomes. CFT states its mission is to improve the lives of all people in our community by investing in their health, wealth, living, and learning. CFT professionally manages over 1,300 charitable funds and has awarded more than $2.6 billion in grants since its 1953 founding.

Featured panelists included Randy Bowman, founder/CEO of AT LAST!; Tamara Brown, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs for the University of Texas at Arlington; and Miguel Solis, president of The Commit Partnership.

Bowman explained AT LAST!’s work.

 “We provide impoverished elementary school-aged children with the educational resources and tools to succeed during the seventeen hours a day they spend at home,” he said. “Definitionally, that is not something that the school is able to do. It’s correcting the imbalance of educational resources in the homelife portion of the day.” 

Brown introduced UTA’s Emerging Mavericks program.

“It’s focused on students who are experiencing homelessness and students in the foster care system,” Brown said, “tailoring resources to help those students to access the resources that we have in our communities and on our campus — be that academic, financial, emotional, support for basic needs — so that they can remain committed, engaged, and enrolled in college and finish the degree that sets up a different future that they have been dreaming of for themselves.” 

The Commit Partnership is focused on workforce opportunities.

“We put a flag in the ground some years back that by 2040, we want to ensure that at least half all 25-to 34-year-olds in Dallas County are earning a living wage,” Solis said. “We primarily focus mainly in the space of education and education systems. We leverage data, research, and insights from the data and research through trusted partnerships that we built through many years, including systems leaders, like superintendents or state legislators. And with those insights, we work alongside our partners to ultimately induce systems change that we think that is going to be better in alignment with making sure more kids being on the path to economic mobility.”

CFT’s North Texas Giving Day raised $70 million on a single day in 2024. 

Since 2003, Educate Texas has partnered with school districts, institutions, businesses, community and civic organizations, state agencies, and policymakers to strengthen the public and higher education systems for all Texas students.