Spotlight on a Fellow: Julia Freeland
By Julia Freeland, '07 Fellow
I am a fellow (and will continue on next year as Communications Coordinator) at NewSchools Venture Fund, a national nonprofit venture philanthropy firm that works to improve public education. At NewSchools, we fund education entrepreneurs pursuing innovative ideas about how we can build a system that achieves better outcomes for all students, particularly those students in underserved communities. The ventures in our portfolio include charter management organizations that run systems of public charter schools, teacher and leader training and support organizations that recruit and train highly talented individuals, and school support organizations that work to develop school facilities, create data systems and even provide food service in schools.
Over the past eight months of my Project 55 fellowship, I have come to understand education’s cumulative effects, both positive and negative. I have developed an appreciation for how much my own education has prepared me, but also have a deeper understanding of how our current education system affords some students the benefits of a great education and for many more, inflicts the lasting disadvantages of a bad one. I have also come to understand the cumulative effects of innovation in education. Great new ideas will render progress in this system possible, but innovation is neither easy nor risk free in a system that has largely resisted change.
My work at NewSchools has shown me both the optimism and patience with which we must approach entrepreneurial ideas in order to see lasting change. With patient capital, high-touch management assistance, and attention to capturing best practices across our portfolio, we not only give entrepreneurial start-ups a chance, but we also help them to build well-run organizations and keep great student outcomes at the center of their goals.
The most exciting part of this work has been seeing the real power and lasting impact of new ideas put into practice. I spoke with an alumna of one of the schools run by a charter management organization that we began funding in 2004. As a member of the organization’s first graduating class, she went on to be the first in her family to graduate college, and has since returned to work at the very organization that ran her high school.
Julia Freeland, '07 Fellow at NewSchools in Chicago.
Her story exemplifies that the great work of these organizations both inspires and breeds individuals who share a common investment in bettering the lives of other students. They are living proof that often a truly innovative idea produces a result greater than the sum of its parts.
I have experienced first hand the opportunities that innovation in education renders possible. In many ways, the organizations we fund are not dissimilar from Project 55 itself. PP55 at its inception was truly innovative. Beyond providing a new set of opportunities for Princeton graduates, members of the class of 1955 have reframed what undergraduates consider a worthwhile way to enter the job market.
Opening students up to the possibility of putting their education towards high-impact nonprofits was a seminal step in what has become a much larger conversation at the university about building a culture rooted in civic engagement. I’ve been lucky to continue in this vein after college, working for an organization that recognizes how entrepreneurs and innovative ideas help to reframe our conversation about a great education and the new opportunities and responsibilities that rest within it.