Now Seeking Bright Ideas!

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The AFT Innovation Fund is now accepting “letters of interest” from state and local AFT affiliates. All letters are due by Feb. 2. Applicants with the most promising ideas will be invited to submit full grant proposals, which will be screened by outside reviewers in the spring. We will announce the 2012 grantees at the AFT’s convention in July.

For 2012, we are encouraging bold and innovative proposals on expanding learning time. We’re seeking both ideas involving students and proposals addressing teachers’ need for additional time—to collaborate with peers, for example. We’ll continue to invest in ideas related to Common Core State Standards implementation and teaching quality, and proposals with a “wow factor” that show the union is taking unexpected risks to improve schools. Read about our funding priorities here.

To date, the fund has made 20 grants to support groundbreaking work across the nation. The thread running through all of the projects is collaboration. “This is bottom-up reform at its best,” says AFT president Randi Weingarten.

Our grantees are opening teacher-designed charter schools, developing a national institute to nurture labor-management cooperation, creating online professional networks to support teachers as their districts redesign evaluation and pay systems, and much more!