Lumina Focuses on 2025 in Its Grant Making

Lumina Foundation for Education
Deadline: Letters of intent are accepted year round
Funding: Median awards are $100,000 each

Lumina Foundation believes that education provides the basis for individual opportunity, economic vitality and social stability. With its partners, Lumina strives to meet workforce demands and close attainment gaps for groups not historically well-served by higher education. Lumina's overarching goal is to increase the higher education attainment rate of the United States to 60 percent by 2025. This will represent an increase of 23 million graduates above current levels of production. While our mission focuses on both student access and success in higher education, our emphasis is on attainment, defined as completing associate and baccalaureate degrees and credentials. Examples of what they fund:

• Work that stimulates broad-based and systemic change, helping the Foundation to accelerate progress on Goal 2025.
• Work that focuses on promoting educational access and success for underserved populations, especially low-income students, students of color, first-generation college students and adult learners. Please note, however, that we do not support direct service programs (see "What We Don't Fund").
• Work to create a more informed environment that is willing to adopt more effective practices and policy reform around issues of access and success.
• Programs that demonstrate capacity for long-term growth and sustainability.
• Research and/or evaluation that results in new knowledge and evidence to strengthen opportunities for postsecondary access and success.
• Work that addresses increasing efficiency, effectiveness and productivity to more cost-effectively educate a significantly larger share of the U.S. population.
• Collaborative work among established organizations with broad, large-scale, interstate or national reach.

Insider's Tip: The foundation recently released an updated version of its A Stronger Nation, a report on the progress being made on its goal. The report finds that the gap between current performance and need is closing, but not quickly enough to meet the goal. Potential applicants preparing letters of intent should be aware of the foundation's following two recommendations to meet the 2025 goal: increase the rate at which students complete college; and provide ways for adults in the workforce to return to college to complete degrees.

For a copy of the report, please visit http://tinyurl.com/37lbq4y
For more information: http://www.luminafoundation.org/grants/