CSF Grant Accelerator Program for Entrepreneurs and Nonprofits leading the wave of Education Reform in India

Deadline: Ongoing

Are you an entrepreneur with just an initial idea (as long as you are willing to take the plunge full- time)? Are you a nonprofit aspiring to lead the next wave of education reform in India? If yes, then apply for the Central Square Foundation’s 2020 Grant Accelerator Program.

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To this end, they run the CSF Grant Accelerator for nonprofits in education, offering access to early-stage capital as well as strategic support.

They want to work with people who are passionate, committed to the education sector and want to push the boundaries of what’s possible. It doesn’t matter if you are already running an organisation or just have an idea in your mind. If you believe strongly that every child deserves and can achieve excellent education, we would like to support your venture.

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Central Square Foundation has funded over 30 organizations working on innovative theories of change in K-12 education.

Focus Areas

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CSF strategy is aimed at identifying gaps in the ecosystem and supporting organizations that have the potential to fill those gaps successfully. Their current areas of focus are:

Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) and Early Childhood Education (ECE)
To ensure that all children achieve foundational literacy and numeracy by primary school (K-5), they hope to support organizations with effective tools and programs to drive ECE and FLN in high-need classrooms.
EdTech for K-8
CSF looks at technology-based solutions, including solutions for both primary and upper primary levels, such as personalized learning models, digital classrooms or technology-based teacher-facing models.
Public Systems Delivery
To ensure effective delivery of solutions at the state level, they aim to support organizations that can strengthen implementation capabilities of state systems. This could include strengthening state-level agencies and departments, building capacity of officials, or streamlining key processes from textbook delivery to accountability.
Others
However, they do not limit ourselves to the above-mentioned areas of focus. They are also open to other innovative models in education driving improvement in learning outcomes, as long as they qualify as per the criteria laid down for their grantee organizations.
Benefits

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Financial support:
They provide unrestricted, non-programmatic funding support to grantees for overall organizational development. The support is typically for a duration of one year, renewable based on review. They fund grantees at three stages:
Incubation Stage: 8 – 20 Lakh per year
Acceleration Stage: 20- 70 Lakh per year.
Growth Stage: 70 Lakh + per year
Strategic and Operational Support:
At CSF, they provide extensive, need based support and value added services to grantee organisations. Key areas of support include:
Solution
Strategy
System for learning
Stakeholder Engagement
Scale
Sustainability
Staff and Skills
Structure
Ecosystem support and Mentorship:
Through vast networks, they provide access to relevant experts and mentors, potential partner and service-provider organisations, the government and in select cases, fundraising opportunities to grantee organisations.
Responsible exit:
They strive to make a responsible exit from grantee organisations. From inception, they work with organisations to establish clear benchmarks that incrementally reduce their dependence on support and help them identify resources to grow independently beyond direct involvement.
Selection Criteria

CSF aims to create an ecosystem of partners who can enable and lead this collaboration towards making meaningful impact. They look for the following in each organization that they support:

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Early To Mid Stage:
They fund organizations in the early stages of developing their solutions, where limited investment will have valuable impact on the organizations’ capacity to deliver effectively and set them up for success. Thus, at the time of investment, their grantees typically range from being just at the idea stage to being up to 3 years old, with a focus on building their organizational capacity.
Non-profit focused on low-income K-12 education ecosystem:
They work with nonprofits who focus on students from underserved communities, either by aiming to improve the government school system in India or by serving the affordable private school system through their solutions.
Strong entrepreneur and team:
They recognize that in the early stages of an organization, the idea and programs go through several iterations. Therefore, they focus disproportionately on the strength and capability of the team to navigate ambiguity and build a successful organization. They look for people who have clarity of vision, are mission-driven and passionate, bring the right technical and organization-building skills, and have a strong learning mindset.
Impact orientation:
They look for strong evidence of impact in terms of student learning (or other relevant outcomes) in grantees’ theory of change. They evaluate the different models based on evidence from global research as well as monitoring and evaluation data from the organization’s program (if available).
Distinctiveness:
They are seeking organizations that bring new, distinctive ideas or approaches to improve the quality of learning. These could be completely new innovations or fundamentally new areas of work, or these could even be improved ways of delivering existing solutions through innovative approaches and tweaks.
Scalability:
To reach goal of ensuring excellent education for every child in India, they look for models that can be ultimately scaled to millions across the country. They partner with organizations aspiring to expand their impact significantly by growing themselves and by collaborating with others stakeholders. This involves building scalable, replicable systems and processes, and knowledge-sharing with the ecosystem.
Technology:
Technology-backed solutions have the capacity to scale very rapidly in a sustainable way. They don’t fund only tech-based solutions, but they are actively looking to support organizations that leverage the power of technology to streamline their systems and processes, enabling fast growth and efficient execution.
Sustainability:
They aim for grantee organizations to become financially sustainable as they scale. They partner with organizations that have a plan and capability for achieving sustainability through funds from other philanthropies, CSR or other donors, by leveraging public funding or by generating revenue from clients.
For more information, visit https://www.centralsquarefoundation.org/grants/apply-grants/