a message from
our executive director

The foundation’s mission—transforming the lives of children living in urban poverty through better health and education—is big, aspirational and the North Star for everything we do.

But our day-to-day efforts are inspired by two more direct demands: 1) achieving measurable results for children, and 2) the roll-up-your-sleeves work of building the processes, models and standards that our partners and grantees need to scale and achieve systemic change. Sometimes that means building tools ourselves. More often it means helping our grantees build analytical rigor into their DNA, and then providing them with additional resources to help them achieve even greater results.

In 2010, we began operations in South Africa, which, in the second decade of its democracy, still has the opportunity to make major shifts in closing persistent opportunity gaps. In India, we focused on creative ways to ensure that each rupee we contributed had exponential impact. We sought to catalyze new market sectors focused on expanding access to basic sanitation, affordable housing and reliable financial services. We collaborated with government to ensure that more children get higher quality instruction. We also helped to train unemployed youth for higher-paying jobs, and continued working to support scalable initiatives to provide India’s urban children with access to basic health ser vices. In the United States, we continued to support a variety of quality education options at both district and charter schools. We supported the development of the Texas Student Data System, and from that, began a national effort to give teachers across the country easy access to actionable information about student performance. The work in Texas helped accelerate the ongoing development of an education data standard, now called Ed-Fi, that launched in 2011.

On the health front, our efforts to combat childhood obesity and related diseases taught us that there are no easy answers: Sustained community-by-community efforts, and partnerships among dozens or even hundreds of stakeholders are the precursors to widespread success.

Through the end of 2010, the foundation had committed more than $730 million to assist organizations working with impoverished children in urban communities in the United States, South Africa and India. Throughout the year, our partners inspired us with creative solutions, amazing results and critical insights. Their work points the way forward, giving us the information we need to continue to test and refine creative approaches to complex challenges.

Janet Mountain, Executive Director