Our Newest Annual Report
We truly appreciate your support of the Alliant Educational Foundation. Our most recent fiscal year has been highly successful, and we’re delighted to share a few of this year’s highlights in this brief report, ahead of the full annual report’s release in the coming weeks.
Among many accomplishments, we’re most proud of completing a bold new strategic plan, re-tooling our Innovation/Seed Grants program to better reflect the mission and values of the Foundation, continuing to support hundreds of students through scholarships across the State of California, expanding our regional children’s Mental Health Consortium to better support under-resourced children and youth and their families, and launching our first-ever “AEF Fellows” program.
Stay tuned for the full annual report launching in April!
Scholarships for Students
On March 15th, the Alliant Educational Foundation (AEF) launched its newest round of scholarship funding. This annual round of funding is made possible, in large part, by the generosity of more than 50 donor-restricted scholarship funds aimed at helping Alliant students across all six California campuses. Approximately $100,000 in tuition assistance will be granted for the coming year. Student applications are open now and due by April 30th.
AEF also released an additional $500,000 in scholarship support in collaboration with the Alliant International University system, with a portion earmarked for a set of diversity, equity, and inclusion scholarships for 2024–2025.
Launch of the “Alliant Ed Foundation Fellows” Program
This year marks the first-ever cohort of the AEF Fellows, a new program supporting up to 20 incoming students across the State of California in their pursuit of PhD and PsyD degrees in clinical psychology. Many of this year’s students share a commitment to social justice and community impact, high GPAs, some level of financial need, and in some cases, are the first to attend college or graduate school in their families.
At scale, this program will support 80-100 such students with multi-year scholarships, peer connections, mentorship, and more. The second cohort of AEF Fellows is being nominated right now and we look forward to a robust second year of this impactful program in 2024–2025.
AEF’s Regional Children’s Mental Health Consortium
The Foundation launched its highly collaborative “mental health consortium” in 2020, helping to place CSPP graduate students in clinical psychology at a variety of youth-serving non-profit organizations throughout San Diego County. At each site, CSPP students bolster the capacity of existing organizations to better address the mental health needs of under-resourced children, youth, and their families at AEF cost.
Support over the past year to help sustain this initiative has been generously provided by San Diego Foundation’s Healthy Children & Families Initiative, the David C. Copley Foundation, Nordson Corporation Foundation, and others. We truly value and appreciate their support.
And we’re expanding! AEF Board Member Janet Hurwich and CEO Valin Brown completed a listening tour to better understand the unmet mental health needs and under-served populations in the San Francisco/Bay Area. Input from 17 funders, direct-service providers, and CSPP faculty members helped shape the direction and focus of the Bay Area consortium—which will also focus on supporting the mental health of under-resourced children and youth, with an emphasis on BIPOC and non-English speaking families starting this fall.
A New Round of Innovation/Seed Grants
After three successful years of investing in new and promising programs, research, and training across the Alliant International University system, the Foundation launched a re-tooled fourth year of innovation/seed grants available to all faculty and staff at Alliant. The redesigned funding program encouraged the following areas of emphasis for 2024–2025: diversity and inclusion, mental health, trauma-informed care, post-COVID issues of depression, anxiety, or social isolation, policing and mental health, conflict-resolution, and social justice.
For the fourth year of this program, we expect to fund a total of five or more grants across Alliant campuses totaling $50,000 in support.
Alumni & Donor Relations Work
Starting in mid-April, AEF will begin working even more closely with Alliant International University in the area of alumni relations. AEF’s new Director of Development & Alumni Relations will continue the great work previously led by Sarah Garro in supporting Alliant’s thousands of talented alums across the network. Additionally, this new full-time role with AEF will assist in supporting individual donors who support our programs. Stay tuned for more information in April and thank you for your support!