In August, IP took a look back at the Partnership for Connecticut, which shuttered just one year after getting off the ground in part through funding and leadership from Dalio Education. We weren’t able to get in touch with Dalio Education in time for publication, but representatives reached out to us with the following statement from founder Barbara Dalio: “It’s unfortunate that the partnership didn’t work out, but the Dalio Education team and I remain 100% committed to working with educators to do what we can to help improve educational outcomes in Connecticut.”
We recently spoke with Barbara Dalio and Andrew Ferguson, Dalio Education’s chief education officer, to learn more about what that looks like. They didn’t want to talk about the Partnership for Connecticut, but they were excited to discuss the organization’s current work.
In its current iteration, Dalio Education has carved out one main focus for its philanthropy: students who are checked out of the education system in the state of Connecticut. Research underwritten by the funder revealed that more than 1 in 5 teens in Connecticut are “disengaged or disconnected.” That is, they are at risk of dropping out of high school or have already done so. Dalio Education is working to reach those students and to help them re-engage and succeed in high school and beyond.
Dalio Education is part of Dalio Philanthropies, the primary giving vehicle of Barbara Dalio and her husband Ray. Ray Dalio founded Connecticut-based Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world. Dalio Philanthropies funds a broad range of causes, including ocean protection, mental health and wellness, and financial inclusion. Barbara Dalio founded and now directs Dalio Education, and is closely involved with its work.
Dalio Education funds across a variety of issues that many other ed funders also support. It boosts tech in schools (during the pandemic, it provided 60,000 laptops to students in low-income Connecticut school districts), and funds programs that promote student success and teacher wellbeing. But its primary commitment is to the large number of Connecticut teens who are disengaged or disconnected — a population that Barbara Dalio believes too many people have given up on.
”When I talk to people, they feel like it’s too late to reach these students,” Dalio said. “But we believe that it’s not too late, and that high school is almost the last opportunity to engage them. It is much harder once they are involved with the juvenile justice system — because that is what happens once kids become disengaged and disconnected. They don’t go to school anymore, many of them are unemployed. And you can imagine what happens when you have young people just out on the street. So we are working hard to bring out these voices and humanize these kids, so people will understand how important this issue is.”
Building a giving strategy
The Dalios may be worth over $19 billion, but Barbara Dalio doesn’t fit the image of a remote and pampered billionaire. When she talks about her foundation’s work, she is soft-spoken and earnest; it is hard to imagine her lounging on a private yacht or jetting off to an exclusive resort. She may do those things, but she also spends a good deal of her time visiting schools, meeting with students, educators and school administrators, and using the information she gathers to guide her foundation’s work.
Dalio stepped into the complicated world of education philanthropy after her four sons left home. Her background was in art, but she was drawn to education, which she believed had a greater need for financial support. But what was the best way to help Connecticut students? It took a while for Dalio to figure that out.
A 2021 report by Leap Ambassadors describes how Barbara Dalio gradually narrowed her foundation’s focus: “When Dalio first started her education philanthropy more than a decade ago, she felt that Dalio Philanthropies’ significant resources would allow her to achieve anything. She’d visit schools, talk to teachers, understand what their needs were — and fund one project after another, from the school library that needed more books to the community-based mental health center.”
Quoted in the report, Dalio said, “Everything felt important. I’d hear about great programs and think, ‘why wouldn’t I do that?’”
But given the vast array of needs in education — more than one philanthropist can support, however amply resourced — Dalio “began to learn that saying no to some projects allowed her to focus her efforts in ways that enabled her to have a greater impact.”
Dalio Education supports disengaged and disconnected young people through its Connecticut Opportunity Project (CTOP), which invests in and works to strengthen six nonprofits serving that youth population. Its mission is informed by a 2016 report, commissioned by Dalio, called “Untapped Potential: Engaging All Connecticut Youth,” which posed the question: “What would it take to help disengaged and disconnected youth in Connecticut graduate from high school ready for the future?”
The report defines disengaged youth as young people who “are enrolled in school, but show at least one of three signs of not being effectively connected to their education” — signs like low attendance, multiple grade failures, or multiple behavior issues. Disconnected youth are young people who “have not received a high school diploma or equivalent and are not enrolled in high school despite being 21 or younger.”
“Untapped Potential” found that, in the 2014–2015 school year, there were 39,000 disengaged and disconnected young people of high school age in Connecticut, “a figure that is equivalent to 22% of high school enrollment in the state.” Seventy-eight percent were low-income or minority students, 36% were boys of color, and 34% were students with disabilities or English language learners. But the problem cuts across class and race lines: Close to 6,000 of the disengaged and disconnected young people were white or Asian and from middle or high-income families; 9,000 were from communities with above-average incomes.
The Dalio Education team believes the number of disengaged and disconnected youth is likely significantly higher today, given the academic fallout of the pandemic. They have commissioned three new studies: one will update the findings of “Untapped Potential,” the second will be a qualitative study of the experiences of disengaged and disconnected youth, and the third will explore effective practices and programs. Dalio expects that these reports will be completed by next summer.
Support you can’t buy
The six nonprofits CTOP supports are Compass Youth Collaborative, Connecticut Violence Intervention Program, Domus, Our Piece of the Pie, Roca Young Mothers Program, and RYASAP. While all of these organizations take different approaches, each seeks to intervene to keep teens engaged and connected — through graduation and into the future, whether that means postsecondary education or job training.
CTOP carefully selects its grantees and provides unrestricted, multiyear funding. It also lends each organization considerable nonfinancial support including “technical assistance and organizational coaching from experts and best-in-class youth development organizations across the country to support their capacity building,” according to CTOP’s website.
Hector Rivera, the CEO of Our Piece of the Pie, said of the partnership, “Having a strategic thought partner in CTOP has allowed us not only to assess our organizational capacity in a meaningful way, but to develop strategies for how to improve. You couldn’t buy that. Especially for someone to support it resource-wise is just unheard of.”
“An invisible crisis”
The human toll of allowing so many young people to check out of the education system is incalculable, but the authors of “Untapped Potential” underscore the high financial cost, estimating that the annual fiscal impact of high school dropouts on Connecticut’s budget is over $900 million.
They also describe the extraordinarily positive impact of bringing those young people back — and the ripple effect it would have. “Helping disengaged and disconnected youth connect to success,” they write, “would spark a virtuous cycle for both these young people and the state as a whole: stronger schools, higher employment, fewer individuals becoming involved with incarceration or addiction, healthier and more prosperous communities, and more rapid and sustainable economic growth.”
Dalio Education’s Andrew Ferguson points out that the problem is widespread. “This is an invisible crisis that affects nearly every community in Connecticut,” he said. “What we are trying to do through the Connecticut Opportunity Project is to support people and organizations who are doing heroic work across the state. We’re also trying to have conversations with anyone who will listen about this invisible crisis.”
It’s too soon to gauge the effectiveness of Dalio Education’s approach, but it’s worth watching, because the problem of students’ “quiet quitting” their education is not confined to Connecticut — it’s an invisible crisis that’s happening all over the country.