New Profit Commits $1 Million in Support of Enlearn

Feb 3, 2016

February 3, 2016 (Boston): New Profit, a national nonprofit venture philanthropy fund working to break down the barriers standing between people and opportunity in America, is investing $1 million over the next four years to support Enlearn, a Seattle-based nonprofit that is helping create and find the best learning pathways for students, teachers, and classrooms so that every student, regardless of ability or situation, has access to a learning ecosystem that adapts to them at the moment.The investment in Enlearn will be a part of The New Profit Innovation Fund (NPIF), New Profitā€™s core investment vehicle, which serves as a learning lab for identifying and catalyzing the best nonprofit and other social impact organizations in America. The funding from NPIF will be unrestricted and supplemented by strategic advisory support from New Profit staff in collaboration with Deloitte Consulting.ā€œDespite huge investments of money and time by governments, academia, and the private sector, we, as a country, havenā€™t significantly improved learning at scale,ā€ said Zoran Popovic, Enlearnā€™s founder and CSO. ā€œWith New Profitā€™s support, we hope to more rapidly scale the impact of our Platform and materially improve learning for students who are performing at a lower level than their peers.ā€

The Enlearn Platform is a self-adaptive, curriculum-agnostic platform that continuously creates and refines personalized pathways through digital courseware, assessments, and games. The Platform constantly identifies ideal parameters that achieve the best outcomes per student, and with access to content, the adaptation is specified to the learning needs at that moment. Because the Platform is tracking many other classroom variables as well, the adaptation is extended to include teacher interventions, recommended instruction, classroom configurations, and other elements of the ecosystem determined to optimize student learning.

ā€œWe believe Enlearn would be a strong contributor to the New Profit Innovation Fund,ā€ notes David Levy, a Senior Advisor to New Profit who will serve on the board of Enlearn. ā€œEnlearnā€™s technology is beginning to demonstrate evidence and ability to improve how students learn and progress and how teachers teach in different and impressive ways.

Enlearn has already proven significant improvement in outcomes. In a 12-week field trial of the Enlearn Platform in 12 schools in Washington, students were solving 4.5 times more problems per class period, and teachers were performing 3.5 times more one-on-one student assists as a result of the prompts from the Plaform. Enlearn plans to use their commercial content partners, such as Voyagers Sopris Learning, to reach millions of students and hundreds of thousands of teachers to generate many more valid assessments quickly that will improve quality and performance.

The investment in Enlearn is part of New Profitā€™s new capacity building partnership with The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. To learn more about the partnership, click here.

Learn more about Enlearn by visiting www.enlearn.org.

About New Profit:
New Profit is a national nonprofit venture philanthropy fund. The organizationā€™s mission is to break down the barriers standing between people and opportunity in America. To do so, New Profit is working to transform the way America educates its children, propels people towards social and financial stability, and creates healthy communities. Since being founded in 1998, New Profit has collaborated with philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, foundations, businesses, policy advocates and other entities to help drive more than $1 billion towards innovative, disruptive approaches to social problem solving. New Profitā€™s unique, integrated approach brings together the following activities: investing through the New Profit Innovation Fund and Focus Funds; changing public policy through America Forward; and building communities of learning and action around innovative new approaches to change through the Gathering of Leaders and other activities. www.newprofit.org.