Fund for Teachers - The Podcast

Teaching is a family business for this mother and daughter. When Daneé Pinckney was a student, her mom, Gail Bowers-Craig, enrolled in night school to earn a degree in education. In fact, Daneé says much of what she learned about teaching was from watching and listening to her mother in those years of study. It was Daneé, however, who blazed the Fund for Teachers trail. Last summer, Daneé used her $5,000 grant to research the ancestry of Black America through Benin, Ghana, and the To...

Virigina Hall studied at Radcliffe College and Barnard College (the women’s colleges of Harvard and Columbia) and spoke three languages. She served as a consular clerk in Poland and Turkey, where a hunting accident required an amputation below the knee.Noor Inayat Kahn studied child psychology at the Sorbonne and music at the Paris Conservatory. The daughter of Sufi Muslims, she was described as quiet, shy, sensitive, and dreamy.Josephine Baker was an American-born French dancer, singer and a...

A 2022 piece by National Public Radio cited Anne Frank as “the most famous young author of all time,” as her diary, translated into more than 65 languages, is one of the most widely read books in the world. One such reader was Nikia Garland. Now a 24-year veteran teacher at Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis, she was once a sixth grader at nearby Farrington Elementary Shool where she picked up the autobiography – never thinking that Anne wouldn’t survive. That surprising conclusion...

Spotify annually sends out its wrap up of your listening habits for the year and Fund for Teachers received a similar one for our podcast. The most downloaded podcast of our year was with today's guest. Stephanie Ascherl is our chief of staff and has been a program officer, as well. Because that episode was SO popular, we're bringing Stephanie back for another edition of "Tips you need to know when completing your grant application." We wanted to produce this podcast at this time as teachers ...

Lhisa Almashy has amassed many accomplishments in her 28-year career teaching English as a Second Language (or ESOL): a master’s degree in education from the University of San Francisco; a doctorate in Leadership and Learning In Organizations from Vanderbilt; award member from and board member of Learning for Justice, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in Education for the State of Florida and Hispanic Teacher of the Year Award for Palm Beach County among them. But an accomplishment one...

When preparing to interview Fellows for this podcast, I’ll do a little research to provide listeners with some context. Usually, that Google search yields LinkedIn accounts, local media coverage, and sometimes statistics from high school glory days. With today’s guest, I ended up on IMDB -- an online database of information related to films, television series, and streaming content online.My curiosity was piqued.Today we’re learning from Gabe Staino – who has taught for 12 years, both interna...

Iceland is known as the Land of Fire and Ice, the most peaceful country in the world 15 years running, and – unfortunately for Big Mac fans – has zero McDonald’s. And, this year, it’s the fellowship destination for seven Fund for Teachers Fellows. Ranging in topic from sustainability and geothermal energy to yoga and elves, grant recipients from Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, and Virginia will learn within the Arctic Circle this summer. Before Fellows begin embarking on their experienti...

According to a report published by Special Olympics and titled “National Snapshot of Adults with Intellectual Disabilities in the Labor Force,” only 44% of adults with ID aged 21-64 are in the labor force. This is compared to 83% of working-age adults without disabilities who are in the labor force. Furthermore, only 34% of adults with intellectual disabilities aged 21-64 are employed, and an approximately equal number work in a sheltered setting. Those are the statistics for the United State...

While Fund for Teachers has invested $30 million in teacher grants for summer fellowships since 2001, this marks only the second year that we’ve awarded Innovation Circle Grants. To extend the value of our traditional summer fellowships, we created this space for FFT Fellows to connect and collaborate around key priorities in education. Fellows propose innovative inquiries into a predetermined set of topics and, through a selective process, receive up to $1,500 to individually pursue summer l...

We’re winding down the month of February -- designated as Black History Month, first celebrated as Negro History Week in 1926 and expanded to a month in 1986 by the United States Congress. According to the Association for the Study of African American Life & History, the designation began in 1915 when University of Chicago alumnae Carter G. Woodson traveled from Washington, D.C. to Chicago to participate in a national celebration of the 50th anniversary of emancipation. And according to F...