A Tech-Focused Family Foundation Takes a Cerebral Approach to Education Funding

The Siegel Family Endowment’s mission is to understand and help influence technology’s impact on society. Its grantmaking is grounded in the scientific method and, according to its website, its approach is “an iterative process of asking questions, systematically interrogating them, and applying our learnings to subsequent rounds of questioning.”

The endowment applies this approach to its education giving — learning is one of the foundation’s three interest areas, along with infrastructure and workforce. Education is one of the largest philanthropy sectors, and funders approach it from a vast array of perspectives and directions, as we outlined in our brief, Giving for K-12 Education. Some focus on specific populations of students, others work on diversifying the teacher workforce, still others support new education models, or, conversely, push to strengthen public education, to cite just a few examples.

The Siegel Family Endowment (SFE)’s brainy and tech-oriented approach to ed philanthropy is inspired by its founder and chairman, David Siegel, a computer scientist who co-founded Two Sigma, a data-driven financial services firm that Forbes describes as “a quantitative investing powerhouse.” As Siegel told my colleague, Ade Adeniji, in a 2020 interview, “I’m a scientist at heart, and when it comes to my philanthropic work, I want to apply the scientific method to figuring out what works and what doesn’t.”

For Siegel and his philanthropy, figuring out what works has a social justice component. “We hear a lot about the harm and the downside of technology,” Joshua Elder, director of grantmaking at SFE, said in a recent interview. “But what’s the role of philanthropy to change that narrative? And what’s the role of philanthropy to be able to support the creation of a new generation of technologists that will be able to shape tech for good and think about social impact?”

Reimagining schools

These are questions that have animated SFE’s approach to ed philanthropy since it was founded in 2011. Not only did Siegel co-found the Scratch Foundation, which supports Scratch, a free coding platform and interactive community for kids, SFE grantees include a number that work to make education — specifically tech-related education — more accessible. Along with Khan Academy, SFE supports organizations with less familiar names like CSForAll, which promotes K-12 computer science education, Bootstrap, which makes free computer and data science curriculum available to classrooms, and Georgia Tech’s Constellations Center for Equity in Computing. In the first half of 2022, SFE boosted its support of computer science and STEM education with grants to Columbia University’s eLab, the Computer Science Teachers Association’s Equity Fellowship, and STEM Teachers NYC.

Since 2020, SFE has also pursued a broader ed focus, training its attention on the education system as a whole. As part of this exploration, SFE recently released a white paper that combines two of its primary interests, learning and infrastructure. “Schools as Community Infrastructure” explores ways that schools can use their physical space, digital networks and social connections to better serve students, families, educators and the local community.

“The disruption of the past three years has exposed just how crucial schools are to the communities they serve,” Elder said when the report was announced. “By viewing our education systems as bigger and more comprehensive than the buildings in which they operate, we have an opportunity to propel both schools and the neighborhoods they are situated in to a brighter future.”

Elder acknowledges that the school as community infrastructure concept is similar to the community school model, which has gained broad support in recent years. Exploring existing ed models will be the next phase of SFE’s approach, he said. “With the launch of the white paper, going into 2023, it will be a gradual shift to finding organizations, communities and schools that are deep in the trenches doing the work to show what’s possible, and then to think about how you scale the impact for others who might be ready for that journey. These ideas will serve as our North Star as we move into the next few years of grantmaking.”

Society’s “risk capital”

SFE’s approach to grantmaking is “predicated on the belief that philanthropy is uniquely positioned to help answer some of the most pressing and complex questions facing society today,” according to its website. And Katy Knight, SFE’s president and executive director, calls philanthropy “society’s risk capital.” Joshua Elder expanded on that idea in a recent interview. “Philanthropy can take chances and risks that others aren’t able to do for a variety of reasons. That can mean supporting fledgling organizations, or leaders that have been overlooked by traditional philanthropy,” he said.

SFE’s “relationship approach” to grantmaking, as Elder calls it, may be risky, but it’s also methodical and deliberate. “We’re really invested in getting to know the organizations we work with,” he said. “Then we actually co-create and write the grant on behalf of the grantee. We know that if we’re looking for ways to support an organization that is in an earlier stage, they don’t necessarily have the resources or the time to write a grant. We definitely want to keep their voice in it, but we want to make sure that the work isn’t a burden. The same thing goes for our reporting. We’re very intentional about every step of the grantmaking process all the way through execution and reporting, to make sure we’re supporting the organizations and the people and not imposing a burden.”

How does SFE know if it is taking too much risk when it supports an organization that, for example, has innovative ideas but doesn’t have much of a track record? “That’s the million-dollar question, right?” Elder said. To mitigate some of that risk, the endowment has many conversations with potential grantees, gathers information, challenges assumptions and asks hard questions in internal meetings among SFE staff, and then gathers still more information to make sure there’s a good fit.

“We have a certain number of meetings, and this could be over a few months, or sometimes a full year of diligence — which I think can be a bit frustrating for organizations,” he said. “But we’re very upfront, and if we know there’s not a fit, we will let the organization know, because we don’t want to waste time. But we also tell them upfront that because we are so relationship-facing, it will require several conversations, and then internal meetings on our side to reach a final decision.”

SFE’s intentional approach — asking questions and exploring them in depth, identifying and supporting organizations doing the work, nurturing new ideas and giving them time to grow, taking risks but practicing due diligence — highlights another important way SFE believes philanthropy can make a difference. “Philanthropy can play an important role by busting down the silos that typically exist in this work,” Elder said. “In many cases, philanthropy can bring people together to connect and think about ways to deepen impact or create new solutions for society’s problems.”

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