Silicon Valley Education Foundation (SVEF) is a non-profit organization serving

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County ...

. Headquartered in

San Jose, California San Jose, officially San José (; ; ), is a major city in the U.S. state of California that is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley and largest city in Northern California by both population and area. With a 2020 popul ...

, the SVEF creates resources and programs for students and educators in Silicon Valley in Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

History

SVEF was founded as a result of a merger of the San Jose Education Foundation and Santa Clara County Education Foundation.

Funding

Recent financials and funding

SVEF's total expenditures in the 2015 fiscal year netted around $5,132,000. These funds were focused 78% on SVEF's programs, 14% on fundraising, and 8% on management. In 2015, SVEF raised more than $1.3 million for its purpose of expanding STEM education in the Silicon Valley. This money came from various donors, including venture-capitalist

John Doerr L. John Doerr (born June 29, 1951) is an American investor and venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins in Menlo Park, California. In February 2009, Doerr was appointed a member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide the Pre ...

. Intel and SanDisk are also sponsors of SVEF, among other corporations such as

Adobe Adobe ( ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for ''mudbrick''. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is used to refer to any kind of e ...

Oracle An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The word '' ...

Cisco Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...

, and

Chevron Chevron (often relating to V-shaped patterns) may refer to: Science and technology * Chevron (aerospace), sawtooth patterns on some jet engines * Chevron (anatomy), a bone * '' Eulithis testata'', a moth * Chevron (geology), a fold in rock ...

Past funding

Since its launch in 1998, SVEF has received support from large foundations focused on improving

education in the United States Education in the United States is provided in public and private schools and by individuals through homeschooling. State governments set overall educational standards, often mandate standardized tests for K–12 public school systems and sup ...

and reducing the

achievement gap Achievement may refer to: * Achievement (heraldry) *Achievement (horse), a racehorse * Achievement (video gaming), a meta-goal defined outside of a game's parameters See also * Achievement test for student assessment * Achiever, a personality t ...

. * The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is a partner of SVEF. The Knight Foundation granted $1.7 million to partially fund the Silicon Valley STEM initiative, that would raise a total of $3 million. * The

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), a merging of the William H. Gates Foundation and the Gates Learning Foundation, is an American private foundation founded by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. Based in Seattle, Washington, it was l ...

made grants of $351,493 (October 2013, for the iHub), $750,000 (October 2014), and $1,616,641 (April 2015). * The

Hewlett Foundation The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, commonly known as the Hewlett Foundation, is a private foundation, established by Hewlett-Packard cofounder William Redington Hewlett and his wife Flora Lamson Hewlett in 1966. The Hewlett Foundation aw ...

made grants of $470,000 (July 2009), $50,000 (November 2009), and $100,000 (July 2011). SVEF has also previously partnered with ConvergeUS, a charity co-founded by

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

co-founder

Biz Stone Christopher Isaac "Biz" Stone (born March 10, 1974) is an American entrepreneur who is a co-founder of Twitter, among other technology companies. Stone was the creative director at Xanga from 1999 to 2001. Stone co-founded Jelly, with Ben Finkel ...

Initiatives and partnerships

SVEF has developed various resources available to school districts around Silicon Valley.

Elevate
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and cience

This program is a 75-hour, 19-day-long summer intervention program that focuses on preparing 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th graders for more advanced math and science courses, as well as offering teachers a 35-hour course for the development of their skills, which is based on

Common Core The Common Core State Standards Initiative, also known as simply Common Core, is an educational initiative from 2010 that details what K–12 students throughout the United States should know in English language arts and mathematics at the conc ...

ideals.

iHub

This pilot program is a platform for entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley to propose various educational and technological products in order to improve education. The program allows students and teachers to provide feedback to the entrepreneurs. Collaborators and partners of this program include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,

Stanford Graduate School of Education The Stanford Graduate School of Education (also known as Stanford GSE, or GSE) is one of the seven schools of Stanford University, and is one of the top education schools in the United States. It was founded in 1891 and offers master's and doc ...

, and several others. It is distinct from the

iHub iHub is an Innovation hub and hacker space for the technology community in Nairobi. It was started in March 2010 by Erik Hersman, a blogger, TED fellow, and entrepreneur and acquired by Co-creation Hub (CcHUB) in 2019. This coworking space, i ...

located in Kenya. SVEF also hosts the Learning Innovation Hub (iHub) Pitch Games, in which entrepreneurs present a product or business model, and judges ask them questions and decide winners. Funding for the competition comes from grants made by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

49ers STEM Leadership Institute

This program was established in a partnership between the

San Francisco 49ers The San Francisco 49ers (also written as the San Francisco Forty-Niners) are a professional American football team based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The 49ers compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member of the league's National ...

, SVEF, and the

Santa Clara Unified School District The Santa Clara Unified School District is a school district in Silicon Valley, serving three cities in Santa Clara County, California: Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, California, Sunnyvale, and San Jose, California, San Jose. Sa ...

. It is a 6-year-long program for grades 7-12, which offers a college-preparatory curriculum that is focused on STEM and core values. Students in the program are challenged with advanced academic classes and participate in year-long projects that allow them to develop teamwork skills. The 49ers STEM Leadership Institute was awarded the Golden Bell Award from the state of California in 2019.

Teacher Innovation Grants

Sponsors such as

Wells Fargo Wells Fargo & Company is an American multinational financial services company with corporate headquarters in San Francisco, California; operational headquarters in Manhattan; and managerial offices throughout the United States and intern ...

allow SVEF to make annual grants called Teacher Innovation Grants (TIG) to teachers in Silicon Valley who apply for this grant. Individual teachers are allowed to apply for up to $1000 for class projects or field-trips, whereas 2 or more teachers are allowed to apply for up to $1500. SVEF has made nearly $800,000 worth of grants for around 1,400 teachers.

East Side Alliance

The

East Side Alliance East or Orient is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from west and is the direction from which the Sun rises on the Earth. Etymology As in other languages, the word is formed from the fac ...

(ESA) is a partnership between 8 school districts in the state of California and Silicon Valley, which serves around 85,000 students. Partners and districts in the ESA agree to collaborate towards common goals, in order to benefit students.

San Jose State University San José State University (San Jose State or SJSU) is a public university in San Jose, California. Established in 1857, SJSU is the oldest public university on the West Coast and the founding campus of the California State University (CSU) sys ...

is also a member of this partnership, and students of member districts are hence given an opportunity for admission to the university by better fitting their standards.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Official Website
Non-profit organizations based in California Silicon Valley