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

Latest News

New book for Anna Malaika Tubbs

A Gates Cambridge Scholar is publishing her second book in May after her first became a New York Times best-seller. Anna Malaika Tubbs’ new book, Erased: What American Patriarchy Has […]

Black Town & Gown film premieres at Cambridge Festival

A Gates Cambridge Scholar is co-directing a documentary film on the historical legacy of Black presence in Cambridge which will premiere at the Cambridge Festival at the end of the […]

The huge economic impact of inaction on climate change

There is a strong economic case for investing in climate mitigation and adaptation because there are significant economic consequences of failing to do so, according to a new report. The […]

Litigating the climate emergency

Naina Agrawal-Hardin is interested in how climate change is being litigated around the world and in global reactions to climate change projections. Beginning this autumn, she will do an MPhil […]