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The FFT Community Factor

Integral to our work is the collaboration of our community partners – foundations, nonprofits and organizations that share our commitment to teachers and their students. Through their partnership on Fellow selection, funding and local support, these valued stakeholders extend Fund for Teachers’ impact across the country in rural and urban schools. We are grateful that…

Life in Action

Students at Life Learning Academy are disconnected – literally and figuratively. Many of the students live on campus, located on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay. Also, students arrive after experiencing life traumas, often involving the juvenile justice system, and not finding success in traditional school settings. Kevin Hicks arrived at Life Learning Academy…

Meet Our New Fellows

Fund for Teachers, one of the nation’s leading organizations supporting preK-12 educators, is proud to announce its 2025 grant recipients. This summer, 357 teachers will leverage $1.625 million into experiential learning in 79 countries on 6 continents. These educators comprise Fund for Teachers’ 25th cohort of FFT Fellows. Since 2001, Fund for Teachers has invested $39 million in 10,225 public, private and…

And they all learned happily ever after

Once upon a time, an elementary school librarian became a Fund for Teachers Fellow, and her fairy tale dreams became a reality. It really did feel like a whirlwind fairy tale. Back in January of 2023, a friend of mine reached out to me about working together on a FFT grant. I was hesitant at…

Music (& History) To Students’ Ears

The town of Roseburg, Oregon has a few notable distinctions – the subject of the Johnny Cash song “Lumberjack” and home to a pack of feral angora goats that predicted weather in the 1980s – but a diverse demographic is not among them. The county seat is 91% white and the students at Roseburg High…

The Nexus of Cultures & Communities

The inspiration behind Fund for Teachers fellowships are as diverse as our Fellows; however, only one (that we know of) stemmed from a subway attack. In November 2021, four Asian-American students were attacked because of their ethnicity by four Black teenagers. Alarmed by subsequent increasing racial tensions at Central High School, members of the school’s…

Experiencing History to Expand Knowledge

Three years ago, Ariana Sanders (Cincinnati) used a $5,000 Fund for Teachers grant to participate in the Witness Tree Institute’s immersive educator experience in Ghana, where she explored the impact of colonization, as well as how Africans protect their natural resources. Her goal was to inform the development of learning objectives and course modules for…

Fellows Helping Fellows

At the height of the Los Angeles fires, FFT Fellow Andrea Lofthouse Quesada posted on Instagram that she and her home were safe. With her permission, we shared her post as a small form of encouragement for her and all of the educators providing students some sense of normalcy as fires continued to rage. On…

Defining a Followship

Fund for Teachers awards grants to individuals and teams of teachers, and one of the most common questions we get is, “What constitutes a team?” The easy answer is “two or more teachers.” For the team from Central Ohio, the answer was “one fifth-grade teacher, a special education teacher, two sixth-grade science teachers, and four…

Blending Craft and Technology

Challenges facing Lora Taylor’s students at STEM School Chattanooga: Advantages for Lora Taylor’s students: Lora Taylor STEM School Chattanooga is a public high school deeply committed to project-based learning that equips students with essential skills for a technology-driven world. At the heart of this learning is digital design and fabrication, where students bring their ideas…

Using Historical Horrors to Face Modern Monsters

According to Monster.com’s article “The Scariest Jobs Ranked by Phobia,” teaching is one of the scariest professions out there. FFT Fellows Allison Friedman (Channel View School for Research – Rockaway Park, NY) and Carmela Gandolfo-Birkel (Baldwin High School – Baldwin, NY) decided to lean into fear – specifically by exploring horror. “Students, teachers, and community…

Collaboration Across the Nation

To reach teachers working in communities across the country, Fund for Teachers partners with local education foundations and philanthropic organizations. Together we market the program, manage and support applicants, conduct selection processes and fund grants. Perhaps our favorite aspect of these collaborations happens each fall, when many of these like-minded organizations host events at which…

Back to the Future via Fund for Teachers

Vincent Pham (The International High School at Prospect Heights – Brooklyn) designed a 2024 Fund for Teachers fellowship to go back and go forward. He spent the month of August in Southeast Asia, researching his heritage to model resilience for students sharing his experiences as a refugee arriving in the United States. The following piece is an amalgamation of…

Paying Peace Forward with Atomic Learning

Today the world remembers the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which took place 79 years ago and resulted in the formal surrender of Japan and the end of World War II. When Ariel Warshaw remembered this pivotal moment in history, she also realized that her viewpoint lacked global perspective, as well as the peace that was catalyzed…

Midsummer’s Teacher Dreams

Half-way through the summer means roughly 50% of our 2024 FFT Fellows have embarked on their self-designed fellowships. Their images and insights, make us even more excited for the rest of the summer… “We dared to dream of a self-guided and personally driven professional development opportunity for the summer of 2024 and Fund for Teachers…

Summer Reading

For decades, summer reading and school year syllabi have included The Great Gatsby, and James Sheridan’s AP English Literature class at Houston’s YES Prep East End Secondary is no exception. This spring, however, his personal experience with the text will far eclipse anything his students could Google related to the novel, the film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, or the Tony-award winning Broadway musical….

Teachers: We’re Hiring

Fund for Teachers’ fellowships are based on the belief that teachers know best what they AND their students need to succeed. We also believe that teachers know best what our organization needs to most effectively support teachers. That’s why we started our Educator Advisory Council (EAC). And that’s why we want you to APPLY for the two-year term/paid opportunity. We are…

Thank You for Paying it Forward

Four years ago, Fund for Teachers decided that because we are about teachers, we wanted teachers’ input about what we do and how. Our Educator Advisory Council (EAC) was the first outcome of that decision. A cohort of FFT Fellows were selected from a competitive application process to inform our programming in the best interest…