To Support Underserved Students, CZI Looks to Strengthen Community and Identity

Zuni drum ceremony in Gallup, New Mexico. Part of CZI’s Funding for student well-being involves support for tribal identity, including for zuni youth in new mexico. Joseph Sohm/shutterstock

Education is tightly intertwined with the two defining issues of this moment—COVID-19 and nationwide demand for racial equity. Structural racism and inequality fuel many of the biggest problems and challenges in our public education system. The pandemic threw the day-to-day routine of teaching into chaos for a full year. And the fallout, which will last for many years, only exacerbates inequality.

That means the future of K-12 philanthropy will largely succeed or fail based on how it handles these underlying issues. In other words, education funding is more complicated than ever.

As the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative takes on that challenge, it’s not helped by the fact that the grantmaker has been hounded by controversy, stemming from complaints about the organization itself, but also its extremely high-profile co-founders. As IP’s Mike Scutari recently observed in a close-up look at CZI’s struggles, “regardless of its track record or its team, there are some unique, inescapable realities surrounding Facebook’s past and present activity that are going to make life more challenging for Zuckerberg’s philanthropic arm.” 

And yet, CZI continues to be one of the most prominent K-12 funders out there, and its grantmaking team is funding some compelling work. For example, the initiative has been a champion of education technology, both before and in the wake of the pandemic. Another way it’s working at the intersection of COVID recovery, racial justice and education is by looking at the wellbeing of young people.

As an example of this work, CZI recently made a $7 million round of grants to five community organizations “to help advance racial equity as well as tribal identity, and support student mental wellness in communities most impacted by COVID-19,” according to the announcement. The grants align with CZI’s “whole-child” approach to education funding, which IP has reported on previously.

“We understand that we cannot support the needs of the whole child without a close connection to the child’s community,” said Brooke Stafford-Brizard, CZI vice president of research to practice. “Community organizations that advance racial equity and strengthen Tribal identity are critical partners in this work.”

Community partners

One of those community grantees is the Center at Sierra Health Foundation, based in Sacramento, California. The center provides mental health and social-emotional support to young men of color, and works to replace traditional forms of school discipline. Its long-term goal is to “transform the educational pipeline and increase the number of young men of color prepared to enter and complete post-secondary education in Sacramento and San Joaquin Valley,” according to the announcement.

Transforming the education pipeline requires the disruption of the school-to-prison pipeline, starting with harsh school discipline policies that lead to suspensions and expulsions, particularly for kids of color. This situation is especially bad in Sacramento County, according to Matt Cervantes, director of health programs at the center. He cited a 2018 report that found that Black men in Sacramento County are suspended at a rate of almost 18 per day, and are 5.4 times more likely to be suspended then their peers in other California counties. 

“We are trying to create a continuum of support in schools so kids get help preventatively, before a problem becomes a discipline issue,” Cervantes said. 

The center works with My Brother’s Keeper Sacramento Collaborative, which provides mentorship and youth fellowship opportunities for young men of color. Both organizations collaborated to create the 1300 Campaign, which is working to send 1,300 additional young men of color to college by 2025. The project launched as a pilot in Sacramento, and Cervantes says they hope to scale it across more communities in the San Joaquin Valley. 

Matt Cervantes describes his organization’s relationship with CZI as a “thought partnership,” which is a common claim, but not always the case in the traditional relationship between grantor and grantee. “Their team had their own ideas, of course, but they were interested in supporting the work we were already doing, versus asking us to do something different,” he said. 

Strengthening Native culture

Another grantee from this latest round is the First Nations Development Institute, based in Longmont, Colorado. The organization works to strengthen Native American communities around the country, and one of its areas of focus is Native youth. When he announced the CZI grant, institute President and CEO Michael Roberts said it would be used to “cultivate Native language, strengthen Native cultures and values, bring together Native youth and elders, and increase youth leadership.”

This work aims to heal some of the enormous damage inflicted on Native Americans over several centuries, which includes efforts through schooling to wipe out tribal nations’ cultures. “If you look at traditional U.S. Indian education since the early 1880s, kids were taken from their tribes and sent to Indian boarding schools, and taught in English-only classrooms,” Roberts said. “It was the genocidal model of education. The goal was to take the Indian out of Indian kids.”

First Nations Development Institute supports programs that affirm the Indian in Indian kids, like the Zuni Youth Enrichment Project (ZYEP) in New Mexico. The project started out as a camp to keep kids busy during the summer months and foster Zuni culture and traditions. The summer camp was so popular that ZYEP began offering after-school and sports programs; they also organized community gardens and worked with the Zuni Health and Wellness Coalition to create miles of walking, running and biking trails. Dakota Wicohan, a First Nations partner in Minnesota, is a cultural center that brings Native youth, elders and artists together for art and community programs. 

“These kinds of programs are particularly effective when they are cross-generational,” Roberts said. “Sometimes our youth will say, ‘Elders know the language and the culture, but they don’t share it.’ And many elders say, ‘The youth don’t care, they don’t want to learn.’ But when you put them together, something powerful happens. There is a really strong connection.” 

Beyond the classroom

CZI seeks out partners like the Center at Sierra Health Foundation and First Nations Development Institute because they approach their work through a “whole-child” lens, which goes beyond classrooms and curriculum.

“We know from science that human relationships, connections, belonging—these are the elements that make a child ready to learn,” said CZI’s Stafford-Brizard. “The goal is for children to be able to bring their whole self to the learning space, and that includes bringing the assets of their community.” 

In that sense, CZI is operating in a space that could be seen as analogous to the way a funder like Robert Wood Johnson Foundation approaches health. Yes, there’s an interest in learning itself—one of the funder’s focus areas is specifically around the science of learning—but also in students’ overall social, mental and emotional wellbeing, the upstream factors that shape their education. (RWJF is, in fact, the incubator for another recent grantee, Forward Promise.)

For Roberts and Cervantes, a strength in CZI’s funding is its willingness to invest in young people who are often overlooked—by society as a whole and by philanthropy in particular. More funders have begun supporting young people of color in recent years, but Native American youth, like Native communities in general, continue to be neglected by philanthropy, as documented in a 2018 report by a First Nations partner.  

“There is a lot of unmet need,” Roberts said, pointing out that his organization is able to fund only 1 in 10 of the applications it receives. “This is messy, not-easy funding,” he said. “There aren’t immediate rewards. You aren’t necessarily going to see eight out of 10 kids graduating from high school this year, for example, so our partners and their goals aren’t seen as low-hanging fruit. Among philanthropists, there is an unwillingness to branch out and take risks in areas they aren’t familiar with.”  

For education funders, taking risks may mean broadening the definition of a quality education to include more than just high grades and test scores. Asked if programs like the Zuni Youth Enrichment Project improve students’ academic outcomes, Roberts pointed to a different measure of success.

“Our partners at Zuni Youth Enrichment are looking at something bigger than the academic piece,” he said. “They are looking at how the child is fitting into their community. What is their gift to their community? That is a tribal tradition: the important thing is for every child to cultivate their gift. From that, so many other positives spring.”