Echidna Giving
/OVERVIEW: Echidna Giving makes grants for both girls’ early childhood education and K-12 education.
IP TAKE: Echidna Giving is laser-focused on advancing girls’ education in countries with limited resources. If your project is out-of-the-box, this funder will particularly appreciate innovative approaches towards advancing its mission. This is a hands-on grantmaker that likes to work with its grantees by providing support beyond its grants. It works with grantees to “ensure they have the resources to thrive as organizations” by building their long-term organizational resilience. Due to the cataclysmic effects of COVID-19 on global education, studies have shown that girls’ education stands to be most impacted. Echidna works to fill this need. Though it works at a local level, its grants support organizations around the world.
PROFILE: Founded by Craig Silverstein and Mary Obelnicki, Echidna Giving works to deliver “the promise of girls’ education” since 2006. The couple have signed the Giving Pledge after amassing their fortune through Google. This private foundation, based in San Francisco, believes that when girls learn, “they can transform their lives, families, towns, cities and nations,” creating “long-lasting” change. As future citizens and mothers, girls grow up to shape the world both at home and in public through a proven “multiplier effect.” According to Echidna and the latest research in the field, educated girls are more likely to have wealthier, healthier families and “survive childbirth, as are their infants.” In a chain response, their children are more likely to also become educated. The foundation, over the next forty years, plans on granting $500 to $700 million to advance girls’ education.
Echidna conducts all of its education philanthropy through a gender lens, using a dual strategy towards its giving that blends both fields, girls and education. It catalyzes work that “promises to fast-track improved outcomes for girls,” and works to support a “robust ecosystem in girls’ education…so that effective ideas can take root.” The foundation ultimately invests in evidence-based projects that enable systemic change beginning at the local level.
Grants for Girls, Early Childhood Education and K-12 Education
Echidna Giving conducts funding to K-12 education focused on young and adolescent girls rather than other ages. This is because, according to scientists, both the young and adolescent brains are primed for “higher-order cognitive development and socio-emotional learning around identity, self-esteem and leadership.” So the foundation focuses on work benefitting girls under 10 years old and up to age 18.
Echidna invests in early childhood education that centers on girls’ participation in “quality, gender-sensitive” programs, while its investments in older girls work to help them “learn skills and mindsets to thrive in school and beyond.” Grantees focused on related work must act as high-potential accelerators that build knowledge, advance practice, and ultimately, change systems.
Rather than investing in national or wide-reaching programs, Echnida invests its grantmaking dollars at the local level where it believes institutions, leaders, and communities are best empowered. This bottom-up approach seeks “strong implementing partners and evidence that governments or other providers are open to taking up successful approaches. In particular, Echidna Giving seeks projects that help girls to build skills and mindsets by improving socio-emotional learning, soft skills, non-cognitive skills, life skills, transferable skills, personality qualities, and 21st century skills.
Important Grant Details:
The foundation’s grants range from the thousands to $500,000, and potentially more. Grants are wide reaching, but only invest in work conducted at the local level. This said, it funds work around the world. Past grantees include Philanthropy University, which is a free online learning platform focused on strengthening local, mission-driven organizations throughout the Global South. Other grantmaking includes organizations like Room to Read, the Global Fund for Children and the Brookings Institution, which oversees the Echidna Global Scholars Program, a program started in 2011, which provides fellowships for leaders in girls' education.
Echidna’s staff is lean, but dynamic. Given its small size and the volume of interest it receives, it does not accept unsolicited proposals; however, it welcomes contact by email: echidna@echidnagiving.org.
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