Unlocking the transformative power of education

A Saga Education tutor helps two students with their math learning. Studies show that Saga’s program of personalized tutoring can generate two-to-three-years’ worth of math learning in a single year.
Education is the foundation of opportunity. Griffin Catalyst works to provide greater access to high-quality education and pathways to success for students across the country, equipping individuals with the tools they need to pursue their dreams.

Our Impact Stories

Charting a New Course for Academic Success

With 53 schools located across New York City, Success Academy is one of the fastest-growing and most effective public charter school networks in the nation. Every one of its high school graduates, mostly from low-income households, has been accepted to attend a four-year college, and more than two-thirds of whom have been accepted by selective or highly selective colleges.

Support from Griffin Catalyst will allow the network to expand dramatically, increasing enrollment by 50% from 20,000 to 30,000 over the next five years—transforming the lives of countless students and their families and serving as a national model for the charter-school approach to public education.

Scaling Personalized Learning

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic threaten to erase decades of academic progress, particularly for low-income students across the country. Personalized tutoring represents a powerful tool to combat this learning loss and help students catch back up to grade level. High-quality tutoring has been proven to accelerate academic achievement, helping students gain 24-36 months of learning in a single academic year.

By supporting Accelerate, Saga Education, and Schoolhouse.world, Griffin Catalyst is expanding access to tutoring and generating new evidence about the most impactful and cost-effective ways to personalize instruction.

Expanding Access to High-Quality Education

A good education is the on-ramp to the American Dream. But for too many students, the opportunity to pursue world-class higher education is out of reach. That’s why Griffin Catalyst is focused on closing this opportunity gap—making strategic investments that allow more students to continue their education.

Historic gifts to Harvard University and the University of Chicago are helping to secure needs-based financial aid to ensure the best and brightest have access to the highest-quality education our country has to offer. By opening doors to world-class institutions and investing in student success, Griffin Catalyst is helping advance education—and American innovation—for generations to come.

Educating America’s Future Problem-Solvers

To tackle the most challenging problems of our time, few skills are more valuable than critical thinking and an ability to understand and evaluate data.

Griffin Catalyst is actively committed to expanding such education in America’s classrooms. Through partnerships with Data Science 4 Everyone, the College Board and Nobel Prize Outreach, Griffin Catalyst is ensuring greater access to data science, computer science and scientific critical thinking curricula, inspiring in children a lifelong passion for problem-solving.  

2-3

Years of additional math learning gained in a single year from Saga Education’s high-impact tutoring model

225+

Griffin Scholars supported annually, making a Harvard education more accessible to talented students around the world

3 M+

Students who will receive data science education from school programs across the US in two years

Geah Jean-Baptiste, a recent graduate and national chess captain from Success Academy High School of the Liberal Arts, is the first student in the Academy’s history to be accepted to Harvard University.
Photo Credit: Success Academy
I started at Success Academy Bed-Stuy in middle school; now I’m at the Success Academy High School of Liberal Arts in Manhattan. In April I found out I got into both Harvard and Yale. Next year I’ll be going to Harvard where I’ll be majoring in Neuroscience. I’m the first person that got into an Ivy League college in my family, and without Success Academy, I know I wouldn’t have gotten into Harvard. The school offered so many opportunities and put me on a path where I was able to get into two Ivy League schools.
Geah Jean-Baptiste
Success Academy Alumna
Geah Jean-Baptiste, a recent graduate and national chess captain from Success Academy High School of the Liberal Arts, is the first student in the Academy’s history to be accepted to Harvard University.
Photo Credit: Success Academy

Featured Partners

Our partner organizations are doing vital work in education. We're proud to support them.

In Brief

April 22, 2023
A $20 million gift from Griffin Catalyst to Miami Dade College — which serves over 100,000 students — will establish the Griffin Scholarship Fund. This support, which represents the largest single gift in the history of Miami Dade College, will provide scholarships for more than 8,000 low-income students, most of them first-generation college-goers.
June 30, 2020
Griffin Catalyst has made the largest gift in the history of the Navy SEAL Foundation, to provide critical education, health care, and financial support to members of one of the U.S. military’s most elite special operations forces and their families.
September 8, 2023
In 2022, Griffin Catalyst joined with partners to support the Organs Initiative, a coalition leveraging data to drive change with broad bipartisan support. The challenge: To fix a broken, inefficient organ donation system that leads to tens of thousands of healthy organs going unrecovered each year and contributes to 30 Americans dying every day for lack of an available organ. In August 2022, the group achieved the first major overhaul of the organ donation system in 40 years, projected to save over 7,000 lives annually. Almost a year later, in July 2023, Congress unanimously passed legislation to break up
February 12, 2024
The Lincoln Memorial has long been one of America’s most visited monuments and the scene of some of the defining moments of the last century. In time for the 250th anniversary of the country, a new expansion project will transform a massive, long-hidden space beneath the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall into an immersive museum, exhibition, and theater space, encouraging visitors to explore the story of one of America’s greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln, and to learn about the nation’s progress toward becoming a more perfect union.
December 27, 2023
The success of Operation Warp Speed in 2020, which brought forth an effective COVID-19 vaccine in less than twelve months, was not only a scientific breakthrough but also a demonstration of the power of an approach called an advanced market commitment (AMC). By creating a demand so that pharmaceutical companies could invest in production prior to proving the efficacies of vaccines, this successful approach accelerated time to market and highlighted the opportunity for a class of similar “market-shaping tools” to accelerate progress. To expand this approach, Griffin Catalyst and Schmidt Futures have partnered with the University of Chicago to launch
December 20, 2023
On ABC's Good Morning America, Anchors Robin Roberts and Lara Spencer joined with Ken Griffin, Founder and CEO of Citadel and Founder of Griffin Catalyst, and Dr. Selwyn Vickers, President and CEO of Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) to announce the largest donation in MSK's nearly 150-year history.
November 21, 2023
In a conversation at George Washington's Mount Vernon, Ken Griffin, Founder and CEO of Citadel and Founder of Griffin Catalyst, joined David Rubenstein, renowned investor and philanthropist, to discuss the importance of America's founding principles and constitutional government.
November 14, 2023
Griffin Catalyst is supporting a major enhancement of UK Biobank, one of the world’s leading scientific resources for health data and biological samples. Griffin Catalyst’s $10 million gift—matched by Eric Schmidt and Schmidt Futures—will enable UK Biobank and scientists from around the world to accelerate research into disease mechanisms, to better leverage artificial intelligence, and to work towards more personalized options for treatment.
September 28, 2023
In a CNBC exclusive interview, Anchor Sara Eisen spoke with Ken Griffin, Founder and CEO of Citadel and Founder of Griffin Catalyst, and Eva Moskowitz, Founder and CEO of Success Academy, about the need to transform education in America to drive U.S. competitiveness.

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