2025-26 Grant Cycle

We are very excited to start this year’s grant cycle. We want to thank you all again and congratulate you for continuing to make progress in educating our city’s children despite the many challenges you have faced over the last several years. We are aware that there are many issues that must be addressed to continue the march towards providing all New Orleans school – aged children a quality education including attracting and retaining talented teachers and administrators, school finances, shifting demographics, and a more challenging political landscape.

We are proud to partner with you and are eager to do our part to help you achieve your mission. We will open the first phase of the 2025-26 grant cycle on June 1st with all applications to be submitted by July 15th.

The details of the 2025-26 PBPF grant cycle and process can be found on our website at www.probonopublicofoundation.org. For your convenience, please note that applicants advancing from the first phase will be notified by September 1, and second phase supporting materials must be submitted by October 1. Grant awards will be announced prior to year-end 2025.

To better inform our decisions we are asking school and CMO leaders to provide information regarding enrollment trends including total enrollment relative to school capacity (please provide brief explanations of projected shortfalls and plans to address them) and student and faculty attendance rates. We also ask you to list your three most valued support and enrichment organizations and describe, in a sentence or two, what you most value about their support. Lastly, we are acutely aware that the current environment for charter boards is challenging. To that end, we would like to hear from you about your board’s commitment to and engagement with governance and financial training (please note that PBPF has an active strategic grant with GNOF for board development as noted below).

We also wanted to provide an update on our funding priorities for this grant cycle. While we will continue to make operational grants to schools, CMO’s and supporting organization, we will prioritize larger strategic grants with the potential to impact our entire system of schools. Given that priority, we do not expect to fund many first-time applications for operational grants and individual grants to past grantees may be smaller than in past years.

Multi-year strategic innovation grants made over the past three years have supported teacher recruitment and retention, board development and support, and a first-ever convening of educational leaders here in New Orleans. We also invite strategic grant applications responding to several areas of focus:

• Innovative programs to help close learning gaps, in Math in particular.
• Initiatives to ensure financial sustainability.
• Innovative programs to encourage parent and school community engagement.
• Innovative programs to identify and develop emerging school leaders.

We look forward to receiving your Phase 1 applications and thank you for your dedication and hard work in assuring that all our students have the opportunity to succeed.