Overdeck Family Foundation Awards $14.5 Million in Grants in Q1 2025

In Q1 2025, our foundation awarded 56 grants totaling over $14.5 million.

Our first quarter grantmaking focuses on identifying and fueling the scale of cost-effective programs and solutions that accelerate improvement in key academic and socioemotional outcomes for all children. As always, we place an emphasis on grantmaking and strategic support that unlock innovation, evidence, and growth for our grantees.

Below, we highlighted just some of the direct impact and ecosystem organizations we’re proud to support this quarter as we kick off our 2025 grantmaking.

Unlocking Innovation and Growth (Direct Impact Grantees)

NEW GRANTEES

The Exceptional Educators portfolio funded three new partnerships designed to enhance the implementation of high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) through strategic staffing, with the goal of improving student outcomes:

• $500,000 over two years to help Leading Educators and Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture design and pilot a new service line that more effectively delivers HQIM-based instruction in 20 Mississippi schools by leveraging teacher leaders;
• $400,000 over two years to equip Arizona State University’s Next Education Workforce and Instruction Partners to support five schools in the Phoenix metro area to integrate team-based staffing models with HQIM-driven instruction; and
• $250,000 over 18 months to support the Tennessee State Collaborative on Reforming Education (TN SCORE) to design and implement team-based staffing models that drive HQIM-based instructional improvement in five districts and two charter management organizations by leveraging teacher leaders.

And the Early Impact team added Help Me Grow to its portfolio, which received a $250,000 18-month pilot grant to support implementing sites to sustain strong outcomes, increase its reach to more than 239,000 families, and enhance its impact measurement framework. Help Me Grow’s early childhood systems-building model centers around a child development hotline that answers families’ questions, screens children for developmental delays, and, if needed, links families to existing services and programs such as early intervention, early care and education, and home visiting.

RENEWALS AND COMMITMENTS

$2,000,000 (year three of a three-year grant) to CommonLit, a free online reading program that supports students to develop advanced reading and writing skills. CommonLit will use the funding to continue developing and scaling its cohesive curricula, professional learning, and assessment platform to 8.5 million students in total, while incorporating additional machine learning and generative AI technology to improve student learning and teacher effectiveness.

$1,500,000 (year two of a three-year grant) to TalkingPoints, an AI-powered multilingual two-way communication platform that connects families and teachers. The funding will support TalkingPoints to engage in ongoing product innovation and deepen its impact at scale as it reaches over 16 million students over three years.

$1,000,000 (year two of a three-year grant) to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which offers high-quality in- and out-of-school science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) learning opportunities designed to inspire young people to increase their interest in STEM and innovation. The organization will use the funding to reach over 300,000 students, as well as subsidize participation in programs for students whose families are unable to cover the costs.

$800,000 (year three of a three-year grant) to Learn Fresh, which develops games and learning tools
that use students’ passion for sports and entertainment to promote STEM engagement and achievement. Learn Fresh will use the funding to continue scaling its suite of programs and build deeper evidence of impact, which includes launching two new comparative studies with district partners to better understand student outcomes.

$700,000 over one year to the National 4-H Council, America’s largest youth development organization. 4-H will use the funding to scale its learning management tool, CLOVER, to 25 percent of 4-H educators as well as support data tracking and evaluation activities, allowing the team to better understand the impact of CLOVER on educator confidence, program quality, and youth STEM outcomes.

A combined $610,100 to the National Museum of Mathematics to support the museum’s operations and programming and other related activities.

$500,000 (year two of a three-year grant) to the National Service Office (NSO) of Nurse-Family Partnership and Child First, two home visiting models with evidence of impact on healthy birth outcomes, child mental health, and language development. Over the three-year grant period, NSO expects to reach 170,000 families, resulting in reductions in preterm births, language delays, and mental health problems for families who are experiencing the most intensive and overlapping adversities.

$430,000 over one year to the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth to support scholarships for advanced learners to attend on-campus summer programs where they can explore the arts and sciences, bioethics, engineering, public health, and more.

$400,000 (year two of a two-year grant) to support EdNavigator‘s pediatric navigation model, which provides one-to-one services to families, improving access to early intervention and special education services. Over the two-year grant period, our funding will enable the organization to reach 2,250 families, test its product-market fit, and strengthen its ability to understand impact on child outcomes.

$350,000 (year two of a two-year grant) to Challenger Center for Space Science Education, which develops and delivers simulation-based STEM programs to students nationwide. Challenger will use the funding to support the growth of its in-person programs to over 210,000 students, while developing, evaluating, and implementing a go-to-market strategy for two digital products.

$260,000 over one year to WNET to support the next season of Cyberchase, an award-winning show that features a crew of young problem-solvers who must outwit the villain Hacker through their critical thinking and math skills. A descriptive study, supported by Overdeck Family Foundation during the previous grant term, found a 25 percent improvement in first and second grade students’ foundational math knowledge after watching multiple Cyberchase episodes.

$150,000 (year two of a two-year grant) to Parent Teacher Home Visits (PTHV), a family engagement model designed to build trusting home-school partnerships through teacher home visits. PTHV will use the funding to refine its growth and sustainability strategy and improve its data infrastructure, while reaching 39,000 students and their families annually. An additional supplement of $60,000 will also support an external validation study led by Lucrecia Santibañez at the University of California, Los Angeles, which will help deepen PTHV’s understanding of its impact on reducing chronic absenteeism and strengthening learning outcomes.

$192,000 over one year to The Governor’s School of New Jersey Program in the Sciences at Drew University. This funding will support nominated high school students to engage in a three-week summer enrichment opportunity aimed at broadening their appreciation and knowledge of the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of the sciences, as well as inspiring future career paths in STEM.

Unlocking Evidence: RESEARCH and FIELD BUILDING

Ecosystem grants are designed to clear the path to scale for our direct impact grantees and strategies.

$1,250,000 over two years to American Institutes for Research to conduct an external scaled randomized controlled trial of TalkingPoints’ family engagement platform for students in Pre-K through fifth grade. The study will estimate the impacts of TalkingPoints on student attendance and academic achievement, determine for whom the model is most effective, and identify the barriers and facilitators to implementation at scale.

$1,250,000 over two years to Education Northwest to conduct an external scaled randomized controlled trial of Springboard Collaborative’s in-school family engagement literacy model for students in kindergarten through third grade. The study will estimate Springboard’s impacts on students’ foundational literacy skills, identify for whom the program is most effective, and identify the barriers and facilitators to implementation.

$499,993 over two years to RAND to conduct an external quasi-experimental evaluation of the National Inventors Hall of Fame’s Camp Invention program. The study will estimate the impact of Camp Invention on fourth through sixth graders’ STEM interest, engagement, self-efficacy, and inventive identity.

$400,000 over two years to the University of Southern California’s Understanding America Study, which will examine parental and student perceptions and behaviors related to absenteeism and AI. The study will deepen understanding about the root causes of behaviors, with the potential to shape district and school approaches to reducing absenteeism and supporting effective AI usage in the classroom.

$385,000 over three years to support the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and its research partner, the Center for Public Research & Leadership (CPRL) at Columbia University, to complete a four-state study of high-quality kindergarten through eighth grade curricula. The study will describe the implementation of the curricula, estimate the impact of the adoption of high-quality curricula on student achievement, and quantify the association between implementation fidelity and growth in student learning outcomes.

$350,000 over one year to the National Congress of Parents and Teachers (National PTA) to support the organization in building district demand for evidence-based family engagement programs by increasing the reach of its Family Engagement Solutions hub and related trainings and technical assistance.

$300,000 over 18 months to support Education Resource Strategies in creating a lighter-touch prototype of its strategic staffing technical assistance services. The project will prepare 10+ district leaders to implement strategic staffing at a lower startup cost and be paired with a measurement framework to assess its impact.

$280,000 over two years to The Research Alliance for New York City Schools to support an impact study of Saga Education’s fully virtual math tutoring model in ninth grade classrooms throughout New York City. The study will estimate the causal impact of Saga’s virtual program on students’ math achievement and benchmark the impact against prior studies of Saga’s fully in-person and hybrid tutoring models.

$250,000 (year two of a three-year grant) to Reach Out and Read to support research partners from the Institute for Child Success and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to finalize clinic recruitment and begin to recruit families into a quasi-experimental study testing the impact of Reach Out and Read on child and family health outcomes. The funds will also support the finalization and validation of the study’s key outcome measures focused on caregiver-clinician relationship quality and caregiver satisfaction.

$250,000 over two years to the University of Nebraska Medical Center to complete the final phase of work needed to scale the Kidsights Data population-level measure of child development. This dataset aims to encourage data-driven decision-making by providing access to previously unavailable insights on children from birth to age five.

$200,000 over two years to the Harvard Graduate School of Education to study the impact of interactive episodes of Lyla in the Loop—made possible through advances in predictive AI—on children’s learning. The funding will allow the team to recruit a larger and more generalizable group of children, collect and report on longer-term follow-up data, and better understand the potential benefits and barriers of predictive AI in children’s media.