San Francisco, California, March, 24, 2022 — TalkingPoints, a nonprofit dedicated to removing systemic barriers to family engagement in education, today announced it has received a $10 million gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott. The contribution, the single largest gift in the organization’s history, will allow TalkingPoints to accelerate its ambitious plans to improve the academic success and well-being of tens of millions of under-resourced students by rapidly scaling its approach.
Building strong family-school connections in support of students is more important now than ever because of ongoing learning disruptions caused by the pandemic, racial injustice, and, for refugee families, the challenges of resettlement in the US. Four out of five public school students come from families that are immigrants, under-resourced, or both. These students are more likely to fall behind academically compared to their peers, sometimes by as much as two years.
“With the power of innovative, easy-to-use technology, we have the opportunity to fundamentally change the trajectory of tens of millions of the most under-resourced students by opening up lines of communication and establishing more points of meaningful collaboration between schools and families,” said TalkingPoints Founder and CEO, Heejae Lim.
Through two-way translated messages, family engagement coaching, and other resources in more than 110 languages, TalkingPoints is the leading multilingual PK-12 family engagement platform connecting schools, teachers, and families so that all students — regardless of their background — thrive inside and outside of the classroom.
To date, TalkingPoints has increased its reach to more than 70,000 schools in under-resourced communities in all 50 states, growing nearly 10 times in reach of families and teachers in the last two years alone. In a recent impact survey, 93% of teachers reported improvements in student academics and well-being after engaging with families through the platform.
As MacKenzie Scott writes in her most recent giving announcement, “Communities with a habit of removing obstacles for different subsets of people tend to get better for everyone.”
This belief drives TalkingPoints’ work as it relentlessly removes systemic barriers to effective, equitable family engagement for the success and wellbeing of each and every student.
“This gift validates the impact we have made to date and will accelerate our work against the organization’s overall growth and strategic initiatives with increased investments in foundational infrastructure and innovation, and plan for the next 10 fold growth in reach and depth of impact for our communities,” said Lim.
About TalkingPoints
TalkingPoints is an education technology nonprofit that removes systemic barriers to effective, equitable family engagement for the success and well-being of each and every student, particularly those from traditionally marginalized communities. TalkingPoints’ multilingual technology platform connects and empowers families and teachers by using human and AI-powered, two-way translated communication and personalized content. This unique approach is driven by a relentless focus on eliminating barriers to strong family-school partnerships, including language, time, mindsets, and capacity to support the development of each and every student. For additional information about TalkingPoints, please visit www.talkingpts.org.
