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Amazing Things

The Morgridge Family Foundation is proud to highlight some of the amazing accomplishments of our friends and colleagues across the country. Feel free to drop us a note at mff@foundationsource.com to bring something amazing to our attention!

Nature Works Everywhere Project Report

The Nature Conservancy launched its Nature Works Everywhere in April 2012. Together with the Morgridge Family Foundation, the Conservancy has successfully expanded the program to include new partners such as PBS, PBS Learning Media, We Are Teachers, the Captain Planet Foundation and many others to reach millions of students in the last three years. Building on these achievements, TNC will continue to expand the program, with a goal of reaching an additional 12 million students around the globe by 2020. View the final project report components here for more information. Congratulations, TNC!

Colorado Meth Project Expanding Outreach and Impact

The Colorado Meth Project has made some major strides in the last year. Here are some of the highlights from their report to stakeholders for 2012:

  • Our website www.MethProject.org became the preferred site when teens searched for "meth" on Google, surpassing Wikipedia. This interactive and educational website kept teens engaged for more than 5 minutes on average during each visit.
  • Colorado teens viewed our impactful video ads more than 9.8 million times in the last year.
  • The personal audio stories were heard more than 1.1 million times by Colorado teens.
  • The recent Healthy Kids Colorado Survey confirmed that teen meth use in Denver dropped by 57% over the past three years, the same timeframe the Colorado Meth Project has served our state.

Distance Learning in Colorado

Early in November of 2012, Shawndra Fordham's Bioscience classes at Rock Canyon High School in Highlands Ranch took distance learning to an exciting new level of innovation. Using Adobe Connect Mobile, laptop computers, iPads, and students' own mobile devices, her five Bioscience class sections connected with researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Lab, a world renowned research laboratory in New York. Each section connected with a different researcher and all sessions were recorded for sharing. The students had just finished a unit on gene silencing so they were able to interact with professionals in the field and see how what they learned is being applied in the "real world." Now that the students are familiar with the video conferencing technology and have connected with the researchers, they will be working in teams of four to host sessions with a researcher which the rest of the class can watch live or recorded. The convergence of science, technology, and content creation is pushing the boundaries of what a traditional classroom is and introducing the students to new careers that they hadn't even considered prior to the class.

The Way We Think About Charity Is Dead Wrong

Check out this amazing TED Talk from activist and fundraiser Dan Pallotta. In the talk he makes some interesting points about how nonprofits are rewarded for frugality rather than their big goals and accomplishments. Maybe it's time to change the way we think about changing the world?

Douglas County Teacher Wins Apple World Class Educator Award

There's a great story and video at the NYTimes / Learning Network blog. Russell Loucks, a Language Arts teacher at Mountain Ridge Middle School in Highlands Ranch, CO recently won the award for his innovative teaching methods and approach which involves technology and getting students to think about the future of storytelling.