Charter School Growth Fund
The Charter School Growth Fund aims to identify the country’s best public charter schools, fund their expansion, and help increase their impact.
Average award: $250,000–$2,000,000
Total awarded: Not specified
Deadline: Rolling
Award Project Period: Annual
Broomfield, CO 80021
The Charter School Growth Fund (CSGF) supports educational leaders and entrepreneurs who want to grow their high-performing public charter schools through the following:
- Seed strategy: Funding supports early stage growth. The Fund targets leaders who want to expand their high-performing public charter schools by serving 250–1,000 additional students in the next two years. Early stage support includes general operating grants between $250,000 and $600,000 to help promising leaders open their next 1–3 schools, business planning, and facilities insights.
- Scale strategy: Funding supports later-stage expansion. The fund targets leaders who want to expand their high-performing public charter schools by growing to serve roughly 1,000+ additional students in the next 3–5 years. This strategy provides grants and low-interest loans of $750,000+ to help promising
public charter schools pursue their multi-year plan to open new schools and increase their impact. - Facility fund: This fund helps leaders to 1) Develop a school facility strategy; and 2) Provide and secure facility financing through attracting low-interest financing from the private and public sectors, and periodically provide low-cost, short-term loans directly. Note that the fund and related facility advisory services are only available to charter networks in the CSGF portfolio.
Public charter schools with the following traits: academic excellence, ambition to grow, commitment to financial sustainability, and strong leadership committed to underserved students.
- $2,000,000 to Breakthrough Charter Schools (Cleveland, OH), an umbrella organization representing four existing charter schools, to provide grants and low-interest loans to help open four additional facilities.
- $1,000,000 to Impact Public Schools (Seattle, WA) to help this charter school organization launch its first school and eventually grow to eight schools. The award also includes support for facilities financing.
- $1,000,000 to Henderson Collegiate (Henderson, NC) to arrange a complex $11,000,000 long-term financing arrangement in partnership with three other lenders. CSGF filled an appraisal and loan-to- value gap by contributing $1,000,000 in subordinated debt from the CSGF Facility Fund.
Complete the online application process for the program of interest. Applications are dependent upon the program of interest, as follows:
Seed strategy: The application is comprised of a number of attachments, including: organizational growth spreadsheet that requires growth projections for the next 12 years; enrollment template spreadsheet that requires information for new schools; discipline spreadsheet that requires ethnicity-specific data around suspensions and expulsion; organization contact spreadsheet that requires contact information for a number of specified key staff positions; high school spreadsheet requiring ethnicity-specific information around test scores for specific subject areas (if applicable); non-academic indicators attachments, detailing how non-academic indicators (e.g. cognitive, physical/mental health, identity/character, or social emotional development) are tracked; short essay questions detailing basic school information, community impact, and how progress is measured; leadership team bios; letter of good standing from charter authorizer; three years of audited financials; and charter contract/agreement.
Scale strategy: Complete the brief email introduction that includes: contact information; number of schools currently operated; charter network details (list selection); growth plan (list selection); scale of future growth (list selection); results most proud of; interest in moving onto academic review stage of CSGF’s process (list selection); and initial questions.