John Bales

The Charter School Growth Fund (“CSGF”) is a non-profit fund working to transform K-12 education by investing in innovative charter school networks that offer outstanding educational options for underserved students. Founded in 2005, our mission is to invest philanthropic capital in the nation’s highest performing charter school operators to dramatically expand their impact on low-income and minority students. We provide financing, business planning support, coaching and other resources that portfolio members require to build networks of high-performing schools. CSGF makes very select investments in charter school management organizations (“CMOs”) that deliver outstanding academic results, while achieving sustainability on public revenues. The 34 members of our current portfolio were chosen from a pool of over 375 applicants. Collectively, they operate the highest performing schools in their cities and many have completely closed the achievement gap between low-income and affluent students. CSGF grant and loan financing packages enable these organizations to expand their capacity to serve more low-income and minority families in their communities. To date, CSGF has committed over $100 million to support the creation of more than 165,000 new seats for low-income and minority students around the country. Currently, CSGF portfolio members operate schools that serve over 100,000 students — more than three times the number they served upon entering our portfolio. Over the next decade, we will continue to invest in extraordinary CMOs – those that can transform American education and ensure demography is not destiny for our nation’s students

Teach For America (TFA) is a nonprofit organization whose stated mission is to "enlist, develop, and mobilize as many as possible of our nation's most promising future leaders to grow and strengthen the movement for educational equity and excellence." The organization aims to accomplish this by recruiting and selecting college graduates from top universities around the United States to serve as teachers. The selected members, known as "corps members," commit to teaching for at least two years in a public or public charter K–12 school in one of the 52 low-income communities that the organization serves.