Ed-tech wins Gates Foundation funding for access work

  • October 18, 2021
Ed-tech wins Gates Foundation funding for access work

Ed-tech non profit co-founded by Greg Nance wins a $980,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Since our founding, we have strived to create meaningful change and impact across the country.

Greg Nance

An ed-tech non-profit co-founded by a Gates Cambridge Scholar has received a $980,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop its free college affordability tool.

Moneythink, co-founded by Greg Nance who is also its Board Chair, says the money will help it to accelerate the development and reach of DecidED, its free college affordability comparison tool to help underrepresented students achieve college success.

Moneythink CEO Joshua Lachs described DecidED as a tool which “enables students to accurately determine which schools offer the best value and create responsible plans to pay, setting them up for college and life success”. It brings together financial aid data and provides transparent information about college costs. It also helps students to build long-term financial wellness habits to avoid them falling into debt.

“With this tremendous boost, we are thrilled to enable Moneythink’s ability to develop and deploy its DecidED tool into its next phases of evolution,” said Greg [2011], who did his MPhil in Management at the University of Cambridge. “Since our founding, we have strived to create meaningful change and impact across the country. This opportunity brings us an important step closer, fuelling our tech-enabled tools for individual students and college advisors while aggregating critical data to inform system-wide decisions that put students in the driver’s seat.”

Since it was set up in 2008, Moneythink’s youth-focused financial capability work has helped more than 33,000 high school students across the US. It has received national recognition, including Capital One’s 2020 Give Back Nonprofit of the Year Award, Goldman Sachs’ Impact Challenge Fan Favourite Award and White House Champion of Change Award under President Obama. Moneythink has also collaborated with leading design and behavioural science firms, such as Ideo.org, Ideas42, PwC, and Fast Forward.

*Picture credit: Moneythink

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