The Wallace Foundation
/OVERVIEW: The Wallace Foundation supports K-12 education and the arts, as well as research on best practices and organizational effectiveness. Recent areas of specific interest have included out-of-school learning and arts organizations for people of color.
IP TAKE: What distinguishes The Wallace Foundation from other funders working in education and the arts is its active and collaborative participation in research. Funding initiatives in all areas tend to focus on one or more research questions about program or organizational effectiveness. Wallace simultaneously supports programs of interest and teams of researchers who assess the relevance and effectiveness of both funded programs and funding strategies. Urban school districts that are willing to partner with nearby universities to produce educational research, as well as arts organizations willing to share data and best practices with arts collaboratives, stand a particularly good chance here.
Wallace is a very transparent funder. While it does not have an easily accessible grants database, it frequently posts news, press releases, blogs, and annual reports about its grantmaking activity. It also offers a wealth of non-grant resources for the nonprofits it partners with, including data, publications, infographics, presentations, and collaboration resources.
This is a relatively accessible funder that generally solicits applications through public requests for proposals. Because this funder’s RFPs tend to be specific in scope, it can take years for grantseekers to find an opportunity that matches their needs. However, with several evolving funding and research initiatives happening at any given time, this grantmaker accepts contact about innovative work in K-12 education and/or the arts, so reach out via the foundation’s contact page with questions and ideas.
PROFILE: Established in the 1980s, the Wallace Foundation is a private foundation based in New York City with national interests. This is the foundation of DeWitt and Lila Acheson Wallace, who founded Reader’s Digest magazine in 1922. They created the foundation from the wealth amassed from their magazine and contributed to educational, artistic and cultural causes during their lifetimes. Today, the foundation’s stated mission is “to foster equity and improvements in learning and enrichment for young people, and in the arts for everyone.” Focus areas include School Leadership, Afterschool, Arts, Summer Learning, Social and Emotional Learning, and Arts Education. The foundation also works to expand the operations and impact of organizations in its focus areas through Cross-sector Collaboration and Financial Management for Nonprofits. It also funds Research on the “organizational well-being” and resilience of “arts organizations of color.”
The Wallace Foundation’s overall grantmaking Approach involves contributing to the expansion of knowledge about the areas in which it gives, which highlights the importance of research to this funder. In this vein, the Foundation’s “Theory of Change” includes:
Understanding context
Generating improvements and insights
Catalyzing broad impact
The Wallace Foundation further explains how it works with its partners and grantees on its site, defining how the foundation view’s the role of research and related issues in closing gaps in education.
Grants for K-12 and Arts Education
Giving for K-12 education, including K-12 arts education, accounts for more than half of Wallace’s annual grantmaking. The foundation makes grants for education and arts education through the following giving areas:
The School Leadership initiative aims to support public schools by improving school leadership, a strong predictor of student success according to research cited by the foundation on its website. Grantmaking in this area has focused on public school districts in urban areas and, over the years, included research on effective school leadership and leadership education and training. Current grantmaking is conducted through the foundation’s Equity Centered Pipeline Initiative, through which the foundation partners with eight urban school districts from across the U.S. to develop comprehensive plans to “produce school leaders capable of advancing their own district’s vision of equity.” Each participating school district works with “local community organizations, two university leader-preparation programs, and the state education agency” and receives over $8 million in funding over a five-year period. Participating districts currently include Baltimore City Public Schools, the Fresno Unified School District in California, and Jefferson County School District in Kentucky, among others. This program will run through 2026, and will contribute to in-progress longitudinal studies of educational outcomes that is being conducted at the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Houston, and California State Polytechnic University, among others.
Since 2003, Wallace’s grantmaking for Afterschool programs have invested in collaborative programming to support, improve, and expand high-quality afterschool learning and enrichment programming for underserved students in large urban districts. Similar to its funding in other areas, Wallace’s grantmaking for afterschool programs combines support for programs with collaborative research on program success and best practices. Current grantee partners include public afterschool programs run by the cities of Denver, Nashville, Philadelphia, and St. Paul.
Funding for Summer Learning aims to provide equitable learning experiences over school breaks for “children from historically marginalized communities.” The foundation launched its National Summer Learning Project in 2011, which, like several other Wallace projects, combines program support with educational research. The program is currently supporting efforts in five cities to create three-year plans for the creation of sustainable, comprehensive summer programming for undeserved children.
The initiative for Social and Emotional Learning recently concluded a six-year commitment to “align and improve SEL practices across school and out-of-school settings” in six urban public school districts. Each district received a minimum of $1 million per year to facilitate programs that “increased opportunities for social and emotional learning,” including instruction, adult coaching and environmental supports. Participants included the cities of Boston, Dallas and Tacoma, and data collected from this initiative was used in multiple research studies, culminating in a “Wallace-commissioned guide to best-practices in social and emotional learning programming.
Giving for Arts Education seeks to engage children and teens and meaningful arts experiences both in and out of school. The foundation’s two-pronged approach for this giving makes grants for school districts seeking to “improve, expand and equitably distribute arts instruction” as well as arts organizations serving youth during after-school hours and summer breaks. Wallace launched a Youth Arts Initiative in 2014, and has given mainly to organizations working with uderserved urban populations. Grantees include the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, Thriving Minds of Dallas and Boston Public Schools’ Arts Expansion Initiative.
Grants for Arts and Culture
The Wallace Foundations’s giving for The Arts has for several years focused on arts organizations of color, specifically those organizations that “provide creative outlets, preserve cultural heritage, offer social support, and serve as gathering spaces.” In 2021, the foundation launched an initiative that both supports arts organizations of color and conducts research “to help illustrate the contribution arts organizations of color make to their communities and to strengthen the case for greater support for such organizations.” This funding has so far offered three types of support:
Grants to expand and strengthen the work of 18 arts organizations with annual budgets of over $500,000.
Grants for arts organizations with budgets of less than $500,000 that aim to increase the equity and inclusivity of their programming.
As well as, “support for research projects that could benefit arts organizations of color.” The research component of this initiative aims to “produce more than 40 new studies about different aspects of the arts ecosystem in which arts organizations of color are vital builders and contributors.”
Recent grantees include Michigan’s Arab American National Museum, the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, as well as several large national organizations involved in research and regranting for the arts. These include New York’s Grantmakers in the Arts, the Theatre Communications Group, the League of American Orchestras, and the National Guild for Community Arts.
Important Grant Details:
The Wallace Foundation’s grants generally range between $100,00 and $500,000. On fewer occasions, Wallace makes grants up to $3 million. Grantseekers may review the foundation’s
This funder’s work is national in scope, but giving appears to concentrate on the East Coast, West Coast, Midwest, Southeast, and parts of the Southwest. It does not otherwise state geographic priorities.
The majority of Wallace’s grants support education, mainly large urban public school districts and public agencies. Arts grants go to organizations of all sizes.
Wallace’s grantmaking prioritizes projects with a research component; the foundation is actively involved in data collection and the dissemination of findings related to their goals in the areas of K-12 education and the arts.
This funder mainly selects grantees “through the issuance of requests for proposals or other careful screening processes.” It posts detailed RFPs on its Funding Opportunities page. Eligibility, guidelines and due dates vary significantly by opportunity.
General inquiries about the grantmaking process may be submitted through the contact page, and the foundation recommends signing up for its newsletter to keep up with new funding opportunities.
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