ECMC Foundation’s Funding Approach
ECMC Foundation invests in ideas, institutions, and innovations that strengthen postsecondary education and expand opportunity for learners nationwide. Driven by our mission to improve higher education for career success among underserved populations through evidence-based innovation, we focus our resources on approaches that create meaningful, lasting improvement across the postsecondary landscape.
At the center of our work is ECMC Foundation’s North Star:
By 2040 gaps in postsecondary completion are eliminated, so that all learners have greater opportunity for thriving careers and economic mobility.
Our funding approach brings this North Star to life through a combination of responsive grantmaking, long-term initiatives, and catalytic investments.
Our Funding Portfolios
ECMC Foundation advances its mission through three complementary funding portfolios that allow us to support timely ideas, invest in long-term solutions, and catalyze innovation across the postsecondary landscape. Together, these portfolios form a flexible approach that meets the field where it is while helping shape the systems learners will rely on tomorrow.
Strategically Responsive Portfolio
The Strategically Responsive Portfolio keeps ECMC Foundation open and attentive to needs and opportunities emerging across the postsecondary field. Through a broad range of grants, the Foundation listens to what practitioners identify most urgent, tracks new trends, and supports timely solutions. This portfolio fuels innovative and effective projects that address barriers to learner success and respond to evolving needs across postsecondary education.
Initiatives Portfolio
The initiatives portfolio focuses on deeper, sustained engagements designed to address specific challenges in postsecondary education. Each initiative represents a multi-year commitment to learning, improvement, and long-term systems change. Through focused grantmaking and partnerships with external evaluators, this portfolio aims to generate durable impact that strengthens institutions and systems over time to increase student success.
Education Innovation Ventures (EIV)
Education Innovation Ventures (EIV) provides catalytic capital to early-stage nonprofit and for-profit ventures that advance both social impact and financial sustainability. Through program-related investments (PRIs), EIV helps promising innovations grow, scale, and demonstrate measurable value for learners. This portfolio supports entrepreneurs and organizations bringing new technology, tools, and models to the postsecondary space.
Our Strategic Priorities – How We Focus Our Funding
While each portfolio operates with distinct purpose, all three are united by a shared set of strategic priorities. These priorities are the core of ECMC Foundation’s strategic framework and guide every grant and investment we make. They help ensure that our resources are directed toward the approaches most likely to strengthen postsecondary education, drive meaningful improvement, and advance our North Star goal.
Together, these priorities create a coherent, mission-driven structure for how we select, learn from, and support the work of partners across the nation.
Remove Barriers to Postsecondary Completion
We support solutions that help learners enroll, persist, and complete postsecondary programs, particularly when obstacles stand in the way of progress. This includes efforts that improve transitions into college, strengthen academic and non-academic supports, and streamline pathways that lead to completion.
Build the Capacity of Institutions, Systems, and Organizations
Strong institutions are essential to strong learner outcomes. We invest in efforts that enhance organizational effectiveness, strengthen leadership infrastructure, improve data use, and help systems better serve their students. These investments create the foundation for long-term improvement.
Transform the Postsecondary Ecosystem
Lasting progress requires rethinking how systems work together. We support innovations, partnerships, and policy-informed efforts that evolve the postsecondary ecosystem into one that is more adaptive, resilient, and responsive to learners. This priority aims to spur systematic change that affects the field at scale.
