The Community Foundation's Education Initiative is intended to help improve academic achievement for Erie County students in grades K-12. Our goal is to provide, and to encourage others to provide, private support for public education as a means to enable our students and schools to achieve a margin of excellence through projects and programs that would otherwise be out of reach within their regular school budgets.

Permanent Endowment Funds
The Education Initiative has two grant components. The first component is a long term strategy to establish permanent endowment funds for each of the participating schools in Erie County. Thanks to the generous support of our donors, the Community Foundation has $250,000 available to launch these endowment funds. The funds have been divided among participating schools on a per pupil basis, and offered to each in the form of a challenge grant, with a dollar for dollar match. Each school has until December 2009 to raise their funds.

The second component of the Education Initiative is a $1,000,000 grant for academic achievement. This year's grant of $250,000 is the 4th and final year of the program for the benefit of the 14,000 young people attending Erie County schools.

Each school district is unique and each faces its own challenges, so in designing our program, we believed it was important to allow each school system to address its own needs and dreams for the future as they best saw fit. We asked only that the grants be used to help students improve academically and that the schools solicit community input in their decision making process.