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Fact Sheet

The United States' future economic growth and the success of our young people depend on addressing crucial higher education challenges. Our nation must ensure that students are acquiring the skills and knowledge to compete in the global economy. We must find ways to educate more of our low-income and minority students — in a cost-effective manner — and ensure that they graduate with the ability to meet changing workforce demands.

Lumina Foundation for Education, a private, Indianapolis-based foundation with about $1.5 billion in assets, pursues the mission of expanding student access to and success in education beyond high school. Since its founding in August 2000, Lumina has made grants totaling more than $250 million.

An increasing portion of Lumina's resources is devoted to the Foundation's three major initiatives — Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count; Making Opportunity Affordable: Reinvesting in College Access and Success; and KnowHow2GO, a college-access campaign.

Achieving the Dream is a national initiative to help more community college students succeed, especially minorities, working adults and students from low-income families. The initiative, launched in 2004, involves a partnership of more than a dozen organizations and includes 83 colleges in 15 states. It emphasizes the use of data to drive change that can improve student success at these colleges. Achieving the Dream also works to improve the environment in which these campuses operate through efforts to engage state policymakers and community leaders.

Making Opportunity Affordable is a national effort to promote the 21st century higher education system that our nation needs. Such a system would provide expanded access, greater student success and improved learning — all at a cost that students and the public can afford. In pursuing this initiative's goals, Lumina will support promising efforts in selected states, build and share a portfolio of effective approaches, and mount a public-education effort to create the public will for reform. Several national organizations, led by Jobs for the Future, are helping carry out the initiative, with additional organizations joining the effort as specific areas of work are identified.

KnowHow2GO, a Lumina-funded public-awareness effort involving the Ad Council and other partners, is designed to encourage low-income students in grades eight to 10 and their families to take the necessary steps toward college. The campaign's public-service advertisements urge young people to find someone who can help them get to college, and direct students and their mentors to a Web site and other resources. KnowHow2GO also features a network of educational institutions, youth organizations, community groups and businesses that offer support to students. This "ground campaign" complements the media campaign.

In addition to these initiatives, Lumina continues to fund a wide array of individual efforts that serve our education access-and-success mission. For example, we maintain a portfolio of grants that support programs providing direct college-access assistance to students. Many of these direct-service grants are part of Lumina's support to College Goal Sunday, a nationwide program that gives low-income families hands-on help in completing the paperwork necessary to obtain financial aid. Through Lumina's support of the KnowHow2GO ground campaign, direct-service grants are helping underserved, low-income students learn how to get to college. We also maintain a growing portfolio of research and policy grants that are helping to build knowledge and stronger definitions of college access, success and student learning. Finally, we work to serve our local community by awarding 10 percent of our annual grants budget to Indiana college access and success programs.