I have a good friend from Cornell who has been working in the world of education since he graduated with me in 2006. He often sends me recommendations of companies that I should feature, and I’ve actually covered quite a few of them. Earlier this week he sent me a note about Achievement First, a New Haven, CT based non-profit organization that manages charter schools across Connecticut and New York. (Sidenote: Having a friend like mine who is super-connected and aware in a particular industry or area can be huge for your job search.) Achievement First got its start in 1998 when a group of founders got together with the goal of creating a public charter school. They succeeded, and the result was Amistad Academy—and it’s been an amazing result. Over the past 7 years, Amistad Academy students have beat state averages in reading and math on the Connecticut Mastery Tests. In 2003 they built on this success by making Achievement First a separate entity to take the lessons learned from Amistad Academy and spread them throughout the region. Since then Achievement First “has grown into a network that includes 17 academies under nine charters in four cities.”
Read the full article →
Tagged as:
Connecticut,
data,
education,
fellowship programs,
information technology,
New York,
non-profit,
Rhode Island,
teaching
I don’t usually do this, but this is important. I find many of the non-profit internships that I feature on One Day, One Internship on Idealist.org. It’s the best resource for non-profit internships on the web, and it’s a non-profit itself. The organization is in trouble right now, and they need money. If they’ve helped your internship search in any way, go to their home page and make a donation—I just did. Even $5 will help.
If Aspen is known for anything, it’s known for skiing and affluence. In 1945 Walter Paepcke, a Chicago businessman, was so inspired by the town’s natural beauty that he wanted it to be known for something else—”as an ideal gathering place for thinkers, leaders, artists, and musicians from all over the world to step away from their daily routines and reflect on the underlying values of society and culture.” He started by organizing events in Aspen like “a celebration of the 200th birthday of German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,” and then he founded The Aspen Institute. It started as a “forum based on the writings of great thinkers of the past and present,” but now it’s evolved into something more. It is now a non-profit organization that fosters “values-based leadership” and provides “a neutral and balanced venue for discussing and acting on critical issues.” It’s certainly an ideas-focused organization, and it is now headquartered in Washington, DC with offices in Aspen, CO and on the Wye River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Read the full article →
Tagged as:
Colorado,
communications,
development,
fellowship programs,
Internships,
Maryland,
non-profit,
public policy,
public relations,
Washington DC
I know that most of us were taught in school that slavery ended nearly 150 years ago, but, unfortunately, that’s not really true. Slavery and human trafficking continue to plague our world, even though most of us aren’t really aware of it. Polaris Project is a non-profit organization is not only bringing awareness to the issues surrounding human trafficking and modern-day slavery, but also combatting them. They do this by “conducting direct outreach and victim identification, providing social services and transitional housing to victims, operating the National Human Trafficking Resource Center (NHTRC) serving as the central national hotline on human trafficking, advocating for stronger state and Federal anti-trafficking legislation, and engaging community members in local and national grassroots efforts.” They’ve been at it since 2002 with offices in Washington, DC; Newark, NJ; Denver, CO; and Tokyo, Japan.
Read the full article →
Tagged as:
administrative,
advocacy,
Colorado,
communications,
development,
fellowship programs,
information technology,
international,
Internships,
Japan,
New Jersey,
non-profit,
operations,
research,
unpaid,
Washington DC
The world of non-profits is built on fundraising. Organizations big and small take money from donors and put it to use how they see fit. The system works, but it leaves a lot to be desired. What if you want to know where your money is going and whom it is helping? What if you want to decide where your money goes? You often can’t. With San Francisco based Kiva you can. You can loan money directly to the working poor. And if you make a wise investment and the person you loan money to succeeds, you’ll get your money back and get to loan it again. You can lend money to a man who runs a food market in Togo or a woman who sells traditional coats in Tajikistan. The choice is yours. Kiva is all about “connect[ing] people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.” It’s a really simple idea that couldn’t have taken hold before the Internet. Now it’s changing the way that we think about giving through microfinance and microfunding.
Read the full article →
Tagged as:
analyst,
analytics,
bilingual,
California,
customer service,
design,
fellowship programs,
information technology,
Internships,
microfinance,
non-profit,
unpaid
Fellowship Programs are the new big thing for college graduates. There are quite a few highly competitive programs like Teach for America, New York City Teaching Fellows, and The New Teacher Project that focus on turning new college grads into teachers in low-income public schools. What about coaching? Athletics has become significantly linked to education in America, and it is also one of the few areas where low-income schools can be on par with their well funded counterparts. Sounds to us like there’s an opportunity to initiate change there. Coaches often seem more accessible to students than teachers are, so why not put the same types of young leaders that are being recruited as teachers in coaching positions at high needs schools and see what happens? That’s what Philip Kovoor wants to do with National Coaching Fellows, the non-profit organization that he recently started.
Read the full article →
Tagged as:
coaching,
development,
education,
fellowship programs,
finance,
Illinois,
information technology,
Internships,
marketing,
non-profit,
Ohio,
operations,
research,
sports
