AIS Receives $50,000 E.E. Ford Grant

The Agnes Irwin School is honored to announce that we have successfully raised the funds necessary to receive the $50,000 E. E. Ford Foundation matching grant in support of our Legacy Through Leadership Program. It is all the more meaningful that these funds were raised through the support of various constituents of the school who generously increased their support or made a new gift to the Agnes Irwin Fund for 2017-18. It speaks volumes of our community that we were able to reach our goal in only six months.

We are incredibly grateful to the E. E. Ford Foundation for seeing the value and potential impact of the Legacy through Leadership Program, a multi-year initiative that is designed to empower faculty members to explore, create, and collaborate on powerful new learning opportunities for students — and to grow their own capacities for teaching and learning.

Agnes Irwin’s Legacy Through Leadership program is a three-year faculty fellowship, overseen by the school’s Innovation Team. The first cohort, eight teacher “Innovation Fellows,” have spent the 2017-18 school year engaging in ongoing professional development. This has included designing an individualized personal growth pathway, researching a variety of pedagogies and classroom technologies, and regular meetings — both one-on-one coaching, and group meetings with the other Innovation Fellows — to discuss strategies for implementing new techniques in the classroom. After this year, the Innovation Fellows will continue their learning path and use their coaching skills to cultivate capacity for innovation in a new cohort of faculty members.

As you can read in the current issue of the Agnes Irwin Magazine, to enhance the effectiveness of this program, funds from the grant will also be used to reconfigure and refurnish a space to create a collaborative faculty hub for innovation.

It is with tremendous gratitude that we thank the 251 contributors that helped us to realize this grant. We are excited to move forward with the Legacy Through Leadership Program and continue to empower girls to learn, to lead, and to live a legacy.