There is tremendous attention today – in every community around the country – to bridging the divide between education and poverty, to the quality of teachers and educational leaders and classroom learning, and to making access to better education everyone’s business.

Thankfully, there are a great many nonprofits seeking to solve these problems and take their ideas to scale – and individual and corporate philanthropy sits right at the epicenter of the dialogue. With public schools in most urban cities woefully underfunded and serving families who lack the resources to make alternative educational choices, philanthropy can move the needle as much, if not more, in this sector than any other. We have helped education advocates and social enterprise organizations raise more money, diversify their philanthropic strategies, recruit talent that can do the same, and build more effective organizations.